Have you heard about The Slender Man?
If not, that’s probably a good thing. He is the stuff that nightmares are made off.
If you’re unfamiliar with this childhood aberration, allow me to paint you a creepy word picture.
The Slender Man is a supernatural character that originated as an internet meme created in 2009. He is always depicted as a thin, unnaturally tall man with a blank and featureless face, wearing a black suit.
The kind of figure you never want to find standing over you in the middle of the night.
Since 2009 The Slender Man myth has slowly inched into every corner of the internet. In most stories, he is seen talking, abducting or traumatising people, particularly children.
The Slender Man is not confined to a single narrative, but appears in many disparate works of fiction, mostly composed online.
The young victim was left to die and eventually crawled out of the woods where she was found, bleeding, by a cyclist.
Now this tale of internet characters and attempted murder is coming to the small screen.
HBO’s Beware the Slenderman is a new documentary which premiered this week and has been billed as the world’s next Making a Murderer and Jinx-style true crime obsession.
But unlike the other two series, Beware the Slenderman isn’t a who-done-it story. It’s much more.
The unnerving doco explores the horror of what happens when mental illness is coupled with the act of finding things within the darkest parts of the internet.
Its synopsis reads:
“Shot over 18 months with heartbreaking access to the families of the would-be murderers, the film plunges deep down the rabbit hole of their crime, a Boogeyman and our society’s most impressionable consumers of media.
“The entrance to the internet can quickly lead us to its dark basement, within just a matter of clicks. How much do we hold children responsible for what they find there?”
We can’t wait.
US network HBO have already snapped up rights to “Beware The Slenderman”, with an air date yet to be announced.
Until then, sleep with your lights on.