A chilling look at ‘Slenderman’ case
Documentary looks at Internet’s influence in the gruesome stabbing of a Wisconsin girl.
In simpler times, anxious parents worried about what might happen to their children at the park or on the walk home from school. These days, parents fret about the dangers that might lurk behind a closed door in their own home.
“Beware the Slenderman,” running Monday on HBO, will do little to quell fears over screen time, social media and the influence of technology on young people. The story it tells is — at the risk of sounding like a local news promo — every parent’s worst nightmare.
The documentary, directed by Irene Taylor Brodsky, examines the disturbing case of Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier, two 12-yearold Wisconsin girls who police say lured a friend into the woods and stabbed her 19 times (she survived). The two are awaiting trial in the 2014 case. The motive for their alleged crime? Pleasing Slender Man, or Slenderman, a fictional boogeyman popularized through Internet forums, blogs and social media that, police say, the girls believed was real.
“Beware the Slenderman” joins a growing list of documentaries that fall under the true-crime banner but that offer something more than lurid sensationalism — “The Jinx,” “Making a Murderer,” “O.J. Made in America.” In this case, it’s a deeply unsettling look at childhood mental illness, the blurred line between the virtual and real, and the potency of Internet memes.
“Beware the Slenderman” uses some of the usual source materials — interviews with family members, home movies, police interrogation footage, local news reports — to establish the basic details of the case. Though Geyser was allegedly the one who stabbed the victim — Payton “Bella” Leutner, her best friend since fourth grade — it was Weier who allegedly egged her on. “Go ballistic, go crazy,” she reportedly said, according to police.
As with other such duos — Leopold and Loeb, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris — Peyser and Weier complement each other in terrible ways. Weier is socially isolated and bullied, spending seemingly most of her free time online. In one of the film’s more affecting sequences, Brodsky re-creates one of Weier’s browsing sessions, clicking through ephemera like an “Are you a psychopath?” quiz and a YouTube clip of a woman feeding a mouse to wild cats.
Peyser initially seems the more dominant and calculating of the two, but we gradually learn that she’s a bright young woman with a strong affinity for fictional worlds. We see snapshots of her dressed as a Vulcan and hear how she believed in Santa Claus until she was 11.
Both girls have mental health issues that slowly came to light but that were not necessarily obvious to their family members. The two find refuge in their shared interests. Like millions of other tweens, they love scary stories and spend hours reading and sharing horror tales on the popular website Creepypasta. They both become particularly fixated with Slender Man, an unusually tall and thin, faceless man who, according to lore, abducts children. To save their families from his wrath, they commit to becoming his “proxies.”
Weier’s and Geyser’s parents, who appear at length in the film, are not the neglectful people it’s easy (or maybe just comforting) to assume they are. Weier’s father worries about the influence of technology on his daughter and is seen trying, unsuccessfully, to pry his son away from the iPad. Peyser’s mother recalls worrying that her daughter never got upset watching films like “Bambi”: “If something bad happened to the main character, she wouldn’t have empathy for them.”
What really sets “Beware the Slenderman” apart is its attempt to place this gruesome case in a broader cultural context. Brodsky spends a considerable amount of time interviewing — via Skype, which seems apt — experts in memes, digital folklore and the Brothers Grimm. They argue that, similar to the Pied Piper or other menacing fictional characters, the Slender Man myth reflects the particular anxieties of its time.
Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins even weighs in, describing a meme, even something innocuous like the Ice Bucket Challenge, as “a virus of the mind spread by being listened to or seen.”
Fittingly, Brodsky incorporates (surprisingly noncheesy) dramatizations of Slender Man into the usual doc blend of interviews, police interrogations, home movies and news reports.
The final third or so of the film also raises questions about childhood mental illness and the justice system, where high-profile crimes such as this one are often handled with an eye toward retribution rather than rehabilitation. Sadly, despite the strange and particular circumstances of this case, it’s just like many others.