Could ‘Beware the Slenderman’ Be Our Next True Crime Obsession?

Move over, ‘Making a
Murderer’… There is a new true crime
documentary coming to HBO. ‘Beware the Slenderman’
premiered this weekend at the
South by Southwest film festival (SXS) and it
has been causing quite a

stir.

The documentary film, by award-winning director Irene Taylor

Brodsky, tells the true story
of two young girls who allegedly stabbed their
friend 19 times, claiming to
do so in order to please a
supernatural “boogeyman”
type character known as, Slenderman. The incident
took place in May of 2014 in

Waukesha, Wisconsin, where the girls, then only 12 years old, had read and

learned about Slenderman
through internet forums and stories.

Slenderman
reportedly originated
as an internet meme in 2009.
Though details of the
Slenderman character vary, most internet folklore
stories typically described
him
as an extremely tall and thin, featureless human-like being wearing a black

suit and tie. The stories tell
horrifying tales of the character stalking,
terrorizing and abducting
people, particularly children. As
mainstream knowledge
of the character grew, Slenderman began to appear in
many aspects of pop culture

including video and online games, and even an episode of Law & Order:
SVU.
There have also been
rumors of a Slenderman themed American Horror Story season
possibly in the
works.

‘Beware the
Slenderman’ is a film, rather than a
series, and is said to focus not only
on the origin of the character and
details
of the case but, also on how such stories can impact impressionable
minds in
real life. The
official synopsis for the film reads:

“BEWARE
THE
SLENDERMAN tells the story of the
internet’s elusive Boogeyman and two 12-
year-old girls who would kill for
him. Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier
lured
their best friend into the woods, stabbed her 19 times, then set out
on an
odyssey to meet the tall
and faceless man known online as Slenderman. 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?”

While there is no set air date yet for ‘Beware
the
Slenderman’, HBO has
released the teaser poster and it is just as creepy as you
would imagine.
Click the image below for a larger
view.

If you are a true
crime story fanatic (like me), then you
definitely will not want to miss this

documentary when it airs.

HBO