The Slender Man (also spelled Slenderman) is a fictional supernatural character that originated as a creepypasta Internet meme created by Something Awful forum user Eric Knudsen (also known as "Victor Surge") in 2009.

The Slender Man has become a pop culture icon, although he is not confined to a single narrative but appears in many disparate works of fiction, typically composed online.

Fiction relating to the Slender Man encompasses many media, including literature, art and video series such as Marble Hornets (2009–2014), wherein he is known as The Operator.

Beginning in 2014, a moral panic occurred over the Slender Man after readers of his fiction were connected to several violent acts, particularly a near-fatal stabbing of a 12-year-old girl in Waukesha, Wisconsin.

Because the Slender Man's fictional "mythology" has evolved without an official "canon" for reference, his appearance, motives, habits, and abilities are not fixed but change depending on the storyteller.

[2] He is most commonly described as very tall and thin with unnaturally long, tentacle-like arms (or mere tentacles),[3] which he can extend to intimidate or capture prey.

[7] Graphic violence and body horror are uncommon in the Slender Man mythos, with many narratives choosing to leave the fate of his victims obscure.

"[11][12] Forum poster Eric Knudsen, under the pseudonym "Victor Surge",[13] contributed two black-and-white images of groups of children to which he added a tall, thin, spectral figure wearing a black suit.

[14][15] Knudsen was inspired to create the Slender Man primarily by Zack Parsons' "That Insidious Beast", Stephen King's The Mist, reports of shadow people, Mothman and the Mad Gasser of Mattoon.

[16] Other inspirations for the character were the Tall Man from the 1979 film Phantasm,[7] H. P. Lovecraft, the surrealist work of William S. Burroughs, and the survival horror video games Silent Hill and Resident Evil.

"[18] Other pre-existing fictional or legendary creatures which are similar to the Slender Man include: the Gentlemen, black-suited, pale, bald demons from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Hush"; men in black, many accounts of which grant them an uncanny appearance with an unnatural walk and "oriental" features; and The Question, a DC Comics superhero with a blank face, whose secret identity is "Victor Sage", a name similar to Knudsen's alias "Victor Surge".

One of the earliest additions was added by a forum user named "Thoreau-Up", who created a folklore story set in 16th-century Germany involving a character called Der Großman, which was, the writer implied, an early reference to the Slender Man.

It tells of a fictional film school friend named Alex Kralie, who had stumbled upon something troubling while shooting his first feature-length project, Marble Hornets.

The video series, published in found footage style on YouTube, forms an alternate reality game describing the filmers' fictional experiences with the Slender Man.

[39] On September 25, 2017, it was reported that Morgan Geyser, then 15, had agreed to plead guilty to attempting to commit first-degree homicide in an arrangement that would allow her to avoid jail time.

[42][43] Russell Jack, the police chief of Waukesha, warned that the Slender Man stabbing "should be a wake-up call for all parents" that "the internet is full of dark and wicked things."

[45] Eddie Daniels of the Pasco County Sheriff's Office said the girl "had visited the website that contains a lot of the Slender Man information and stories [...] It would be safe to say there is a connection to that.

[52] The Waukesha stabbing and the negative media attention it generated irreversibly altered the Slender Man legend and the online community surrounding it.

[42][43] What had previously just been a creepy horror meme to most people suddenly acquired a new level of reality that most fans of Slender Man found horrifying.

[53] In 2016, Sony Pictures subsidiary Screen Gems partnered with Mythology Entertainment to bring a Slender Man film into theatres, with the title character portrayed by Javier Botet.

[43] Upon its release in August 2018, the film Slender Man, despite being declared a box-office bomb[42] and receiving both little marketing and overwhelmingly negative reviews from critics,[55][56][42] went on to gross several times its $10 million budget worldwide.

[57] David Ehrlich of IndieWire gave the film a D, writing "a tasteless and inedibly undercooked serving of the Internet's stalest creepypasta, Slender Man aspires to be for the YouTube era what The Ring was to the last gasps of the VHS generation.

Because the character and its motives are shrouded in mystery, users can easily adapt existing Slender Man tropes and imagery to create new stories.

In these respects, the Slender Man is similar to campfire stories or urban legends, and the character's success comes from enabling both social interaction and personal acts of creative expression.

"[2] Peck sees parallels between the Slender Man and common anxieties about the digital age, such as feelings of constant connectedness and unknown third-party observation.

He concludes that the Slender Man represents a digital legend cycle that combines the generic conventions and emergent qualities of oral and visual performance with the collaborative potential of networked communication.

[60] Professor Thomas Pettitt of the University of Southern Denmark has described the Slender Man as being an exemplar of the modern age's closing of the "Gutenberg Parenthesis"; the time period from the invention of the printing press to the spread of the web in which stories and information were codified in discrete media, to a return to the older, more primal forms of storytelling, exemplified by oral tradition and campfire tales, in which the same story can be retold, reinterpreted and recast by different tellers, allowing the lore to expand and evolve with time.

Though Knudsen himself has given his personal blessing to a number of Slender Man-related projects, the issue is complicated by the fact that, while he is the character's creator, a third party holds the options to any adaptations into other media, including film and television.

[67] That same year, the sixteenth season of the crime drama TV series Law & Order: Special Victims Unit featured an episode, "Glasgowman's Wrath", inspired by the Slender Man stabbings.