In May 2014, two twelve-year-old girls were apprehended by police and charged with attempting to murder a classmate, allegedly to prove their loyalty to the occult entity called Slender Man. This occult menace, the American public soon learned, had been ostentatiously invented by participants as an example of “creepypasta,” a virtual mode of generating and sharing tales of horror online. Among the strategies used to make such stories more compelling were alleged photos, official documents, and stories relating personal encounters with the occult menace. Web-users familiar with “creepypasta” conventions implicitly understood that such “authenticating” details were a familiar stylistic device, not evidence that the stories were factually true. However, in the wake of the Waukesha affair, many adults claimed that young people like the perpetrators were not mature enough to distinguish fact from fantasy in narrative complexes like these. Such confusion could lead to dangerous mental states in which young people were enticed to act out elements of such horror stories in violent ways.
Folklorists who had documented the role of ostension in legend performance and transmission at once saw the concept’s relevance to the Waukesha incident. Slender Man Is Coming is a valuable collection of the ongoing work to apply folkloristic concepts to the emerging field of discourse generated by the Internet. In doing so, folklorists identify ways in which concepts originally proposed to describe oral, face-to-face talk remain relevant to the newer forms of discourse enabled by computer-based communication.
This volume includes eight academic essays, along with an introduction by the editors that defines key terms and provides historical background on the origins of Creepypasta in general and the Slender Man corpus in particular. Trevor J. Blank and Lynne S. McNeill also sound a keynote for the volume, asserting that this material illustrates the typical dynamics of legendry and belief rather than tale-telling and pretense, and therefore the Slender Man phenomenon and similar online topics deserve folklorists’ careful observation.
Jeffrey A. Tolbert takes the lead in this volume, using the Slender Man material to explore the theoretical applications of ostension and ostensive action. In the first of these, “‘The Sort of Story that Has You Covering Your Mirrors,’” he boldly proposes the concept of “reverse ostension,” a social process that inverts the usual relationship between legend and experience. The generation of the Slender Man mythos, Tolbert shows, began as discussion of initially disparate “experiences” that in the Creepypasta subculture gradually generated “a more or less coherent body of narratives” (27). Also, he notes, many key figures in this online tradition’s generation were quite aware of academic folkloristics and consciously used scholarly concepts such as “urban legend” to guide their creative actions. Tolbert’s second essay, “‘Dark and Wicked Things,’” expands on this insight, arguing that such narrative complexes generate “legend ecologies,” a subculture’s consensus of what is plausibly real. But, Tolbert adds, the evolution of such an ecology may provide incentive for violent acts such as the Waukesha attack as a “contribution to the Slender Man mythos” (105).
Other essays develop the folkloristic implications of this virtual complex. Andrea Kitta argues provocatively that both child and mature participants find the Slender Man concept compelling because it embodies legend’s capacity to “name” and thus elegantly express a wider variety of real-life uncanny experiences. Andrew Peck provides a cautionary discussion of how the majority of participants in this narrative complex engage in “ostensive practice” rather than literal ostension. Rather than being private, transgressive acts carried out by “mad killers,” as Dégh and Vázsonyi initially proposed (1995:245-7), most acts of ostension are carefully foregrounded social exploits. Normally, ostensive practice involves collaboration with others who know the narrative well and leads to communal appreciation of it as a narrative, and personal reflection on it as experience. While literal ostension remains possible, the folk tradition in fact ensures that most legend performances in this mode are benign and usually playful in nature.
Elizabeth Tucker shows additional ways in which such narrative elements can form the base of playful pranks among friends or siblings. An extra level of social foregrounding is provided here when these pranks are recorded as videos on cell phones, then uploaded to the social media site YouTube. This provides an interesting illustration of the ways in which ostensive practice leads to communal appreciation, notably discussion of how a prank “succeeded” or “failed.” (Interestingly, Tucker finds, some “failed” pranks generate more discussion than the ones that “worked.”)
Two useful contributions suggest that the issues raised by the Slender Man phenomenon are in fact not new but reflections of dynamics found in pre-digital popular culture. Paul Manning discusses the role of alleged photographs of Slender Man in the creation of the corpus and suggests that the act of producing a “real” image of this legendary creature is parallel to the early twentieth-century actions of the Cottingley children, who claimed to have photographed “real” fairies in their countryside. The act of producing such documentary evidence for a fabulous being, Manning suggests, is itself a kind of ostension, producing a liminal point of contact between the legendary world and this one. More suggestively, Timothy H. Evans compares the style and conventions of Slender Man “encounter” stories with the self-aware horror story approach of H. P. Lovecraft and his associates. This influential author conceded that his stories were total fabrications, but added that his goal was to capture the illusion of an actual experience, “a stark, simple account, full of homely corroborative details . . . clever enough to make adults believe it” (131). Indeed, as Evans notes, Lovecraft was successful enough in his fabrication of the Necronomicon, an existentially evil book, that many police investigators during the Satanism Scare of the 1980s accepted it as a reality and blamed it for alleged “cult” murders. Laycock (2019) provides additional details on the way in which this self-aware fiction spread and became “fact” for many professionally trained adults.
A deviant but essential contribution comes from Mikel J. Koven, who sounds a healthy note of caution for folklorists. Slender Man is not a “legend” by any existing folkloristic methodology, as it was created and accepted as a playful “meme” and circulates in digital forms that are themselves understood as imaginary by their users. That the story might have inspired the Waukesha youngsters to commit a violent act does not in itself prove its legendary or ostensive status. Koven suggests that the controversy over this attack is best understood as a moral panic, similar to previous scares in which movies, TV series, or video games were alleged to have inspired violent crimes among impressionable viewers. Well said, and Koven’s practical objections, carefully keyed to the other contributors’ essays, deserve careful attention. The concept of ostension, from its origins in folkloristic scholarship, has risked becoming itself a pop-culture horror motif, and its inclusion in horror films like Urban Legend (1998) shows that, if the concept is to remain academically valid, it needs to be used cautiously, in a nuanced way.
Nevertheless, the volume is all the more useful for having this note of skepticism sounded. Clearly the Slender Man corpus is founded on a Lovecraftian notion of using consensus reality as the platform on which these stories, alleged experiences, and pranks are founded. The volume could have been improved in some modest ways, especially in editing out some of the repetition that occurs among the essays. The story of the corpus’s origins on the Something Awful forum is repeated several times, as are the facts of the Waukesha attack. And some essays are quite dense in theoretical discussion, making the book slow reading. Nevertheless, the book is essential for legend scholars and for those documenting how tradition continues to penetrate and inform the Digital Revolution.
Works Cited
Dégh, Linda, and Andrew Vázsonyi. "Does the Word 'Dog' Bite? Ostensive Action: A Means of Legend-Telling." In Linda Dégh, Narratives in Society: A Performer-Centered Study of Narration, 236-62. FF Communications No. 255. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1995 (1983).
Laycock, Joseph P. “How the Necronomicon Became Real: The Ecology of a Legend.” In The Paranormal and Popular Culture: A Postmodern Religious Landscape, edited by Darryl Caterine and John W. Morehead, 184-97. New York: Routledge, 2019.
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[Review length: 1366 words • Review posted on November 14, 2019]