Movie Review: “Slender Man”

This typical teen horror movie is so bad, it’s scary

Kolby Spomer
Staff Writer

“Slender Man”? More like literally the worst movie I have ever had the misfortune of seeing. This movie is what would happen if you told an undergraduate film major to make a movie that rips off every other horror movie ever made. You know what, no, that isn’t right. That’s being too harsh on film students. Let’s dive into what exactly makes this piece of burning garbage fire particularly repulsive.

This piece of toilet paper was directed by Sylvain White. Under his direction, the film fails to have any resemblance to a coherent story, the pacing is all over the place, and the cinematography is atrocious. Now while I deeply hate everything about this film, I know that typically films like this are meddled with by executives, so I don’t feel like placing all of the blame on Sylvain is fair.

However, even if left untouched, “Slender Man” would still be absolute dog trash. The worst thing the movie does, however, him and the team of writers made absolute idiots of themselves by stealing scenes and tropes from every other horror movie ever. Over the course of the movie I was able to count at least twenty instances of blatant plagiarism of better films, like “Poltergeist” and “The Ring”.

The actresses in this film aren’t getting out of this article clean either. Joey King leads the cast of girls trying to escape the titular monster. King’s performance isn’t that bad, but it is still bad.

The rest of her cast members, however, are absolutely awful — and yes, I know they are kids and I know the writing is to blame as well, but oh my god it is so bad. The “main girl” is played by Julia Goldani Telles, and good lord she suuuuuucks. She remains completely wooden the whole film, except when she is in a “scary” scene. In those scenes, she musters what I assume she thinks fear looks like, but it comes out looking more like the face you make when your kid brother tries to scare you and you don’t want him to feel bad so you play along and go “Ahh!” but he can tell your hearts not really in it so he gets sad anyways.

Then you both feel bad so you just leave and then you hear him crying in his room later and you ask why and he says its because he isn’t scary and you say it’s okay not to be scary and then you hug and it’s all okay. Yeah her acting in this is like that.

If there was anything positive I had to say about this movie, it would probably be it made me laugh a good amount. Which is a huge negative when you’re talking about a serious horror film like “Slender Man”, but it’s all its got, so I’m adding it.

If you have any desire to see a train wreck of a movie like this, or you just like laughing at movies, or, hell, you just don’t have anything else to do, you can catch the movie at the Ostrander Auditorium on campus Oct. 25 at 9:30 p.m. as well as the 26th and 27th at 7:30 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. Tickets are free and popcorn is only a buck! 

Feature photo by Maria Ly | MSU Reporter.