You'll have to indulge my baser desire to view movies as a form of escapism, and not in-depth studies on how much people suck.Clearing the Eye said:
Poll: Proposal: Slender Man Found Footage Movie
- Thread starter TheIronRuler
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No. Not really. One could smell the pretension from the high horse of which I am currently upon.Clearing the Eye said:
OT: Sounds like a good idea, but I doubt it will ever come together and work
It's been done. Quite a few student films on youtube about the subject, this is the only one I happen to have on hand though (not a recommendation, I just happen to have it bookmarked for later viewing).Nouw said:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5apy27bksGo
As for the idea of a movie... I'm lukewarm to the idea at best. Certainly not a feature film release. Slenderman is at its best as an ARG, more of a phenomenon than anything concrete. A communal ghost story full of fragmented documentation and shopped images and artwork in which everyone present was a participant. MarbleHornets [http://www.youtube.com/user/MarbleHornets] continued this with their own "found footage" web series; Jay's twitter [https://twitter.com/marblehornets] where he gave a running narrative and responded to commentors; and the totheark [http://www.youtube.com/user/totheark] addendum series filled with creepy imagery, alternate shots, and hidden messages for the puzzle solver familiar with video editing software. The real draw to Slenderman though, as is typical of an ARG, is its exclusivity. Despite how popular it's become in the last few years, you still had to go out and search for it. Slenderman traveled along word of mouth and haunting imagery alone, when you finally found it you gained a sense of achievement. When people posted on the subject, even if you didn't personally contribute anything you still felt rewarded for being "in on it".
Really though, with all the crap ton of deviantart Slendy fanart, the knowyourmeme entry and multiple wikis, all the marblehornet knockoffs, and more recently the game, it's apparent that Slenderman is becoming too saturated. The air of mystery is slowly draining away as more and more information is added and the phenomenon becomes more concrete and definable. For lack of better words (and I really hate myself for saying this), Slenderman is becoming too mainstream. Now, I'm not saying that Slenderman is finished or trying to disparage some of the more recent entries to the Slenderman mythos. However, I am sure that a film (feature release or in any way of an official capacity) would be the final nail in Slenderman's extremely disproportionate coffin.
...Unless of course this was supposed to be an ironic creativity exercise in which we discussed a "Slenderman Movie" (in the biggest quotation marks imaginable) and filled it with modern schlocky horror tropes. In that case, I vouch that we combine the elements of FearDotCom, The Ring, and this video [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SP52WbnnVBs] for a Web 2.0 horror film.
Slenderman as a cultural phenomenon spreads like wildfire among the internet savvy and fills entire message boards with 'recovered photographs' images and 'found footage' videos. As the movement grows in numbers, so does the complexity of these 'recovered' items. After a while though, unnerving images and video footage related to Slenderman start surfacing, some of which seem to have a growing number of people under the impression that they look way too authentic to be fake. Tied into that are mysterious disappearances of people around the world, including several notable posters on Slenderman devotes forums and message boards. They are quickly dismissed as elaborate hoaxes though, while more and more content appear.
Enter the movie's main character: Heroine Mainprotagonista. She's a mid to late 20's grad student working on a dissertation about the evolution ARGs (or about the found footage genre, or maybe even meme theory and the spread of paranoia-driven hoaxes) of which a considerable portion is devoted to the Slenderman mythos. While posting on a message board devoted to a web series relating to Slenderman uploaded by followtheleader, she comes across a newly posted video in reply to one of her latest comments. Watching the video, she sees a pair of college-aged girls hiking along a forest-laden mountain trail. Thinking nothing of it, she forgets about the video and continues researching for her dissertation.
During the course of her research, she reaches the snuff film urban legends from the 60's and 70's where people claimed to have received mysterious packages in the mail (or found switched out with movies they rented from video stores) of unlabeled VHS tapes depicting the stalking and killing of other human beings. While most were found to be hoaxes and staged in front of handheld cameras, a few were found to in actuality be very real. While watching through a stack of "hoax" tapes she comes across one with a young man and woman walking through a forest to a cabin filmed by a second man. Spotting something, she pauses the tape and notices what appears to be a tall looming figure in black in the backdrop among the trees. Curious, she rewinds the video and watches it again, finding more instances of the mysterious figure and noting it for future reference.
Early the next morning, she reads about a pair of missing girls that disappeared during a hiking trip. She's momentarily uninterested... until she recognizes the pictures of pair of girls in the newspaper as the pair of girls from the video she saw. Going back to the message board, she finds that the user who posted the video had their account created exactly 1 minute after her original post, and had only posted that one video reply before logging out almost immediately later. Rewatching the video, paying closer attention this time, she also swears that she could see the same mysterious tall figure among the trees as in the VHS tape she saw the previous day.
Significantly disturbed and intrigued by the revelation, she finds herself distracted by it throughout the course of the day and during all her classes. While walking back to her apartment from the university at night, she has the uncomfortable sensation that she's being watched. Turning around, she finds no one there. After returning to her apartment and over the next few, she still can't shake that sensation of being watched. She also starts hearing mysterious noises outside her apartment and finds items within it that she could've sworn were in another place the previous night. Swept up in paranoia and in an effort to reassure herself that she's just imagining things, she begins setting up cameras around her living space and carrying a handheld around with her while she's out...
Enter the movie's main character: Heroine Mainprotagonista. She's a mid to late 20's grad student working on a dissertation about the evolution ARGs (or about the found footage genre, or maybe even meme theory and the spread of paranoia-driven hoaxes) of which a considerable portion is devoted to the Slenderman mythos. While posting on a message board devoted to a web series relating to Slenderman uploaded by followtheleader, she comes across a newly posted video in reply to one of her latest comments. Watching the video, she sees a pair of college-aged girls hiking along a forest-laden mountain trail. Thinking nothing of it, she forgets about the video and continues researching for her dissertation.
During the course of her research, she reaches the snuff film urban legends from the 60's and 70's where people claimed to have received mysterious packages in the mail (or found switched out with movies they rented from video stores) of unlabeled VHS tapes depicting the stalking and killing of other human beings. While most were found to be hoaxes and staged in front of handheld cameras, a few were found to in actuality be very real. While watching through a stack of "hoax" tapes she comes across one with a young man and woman walking through a forest to a cabin filmed by a second man. Spotting something, she pauses the tape and notices what appears to be a tall looming figure in black in the backdrop among the trees. Curious, she rewinds the video and watches it again, finding more instances of the mysterious figure and noting it for future reference.
Early the next morning, she reads about a pair of missing girls that disappeared during a hiking trip. She's momentarily uninterested... until she recognizes the pictures of pair of girls in the newspaper as the pair of girls from the video she saw. Going back to the message board, she finds that the user who posted the video had their account created exactly 1 minute after her original post, and had only posted that one video reply before logging out almost immediately later. Rewatching the video, paying closer attention this time, she also swears that she could see the same mysterious tall figure among the trees as in the VHS tape she saw the previous day.
Significantly disturbed and intrigued by the revelation, she finds herself distracted by it throughout the course of the day and during all her classes. While walking back to her apartment from the university at night, she has the uncomfortable sensation that she's being watched. Turning around, she finds no one there. After returning to her apartment and over the next few, she still can't shake that sensation of being watched. She also starts hearing mysterious noises outside her apartment and finds items within it that she could've sworn were in another place the previous night. Swept up in paranoia and in an effort to reassure herself that she's just imagining things, she begins setting up cameras around her living space and carrying a handheld around with her while she's out...
.Gottesstrafe said:
Neat! Now instead of stupid ass people recording themselves for... the lulz? We have a sincerely disturbed and terrified woman who wants to find out whether the things that plague her are in her mind or are walking outside, trying to get in from the outside and eat her delicious brain.
I know you wrote it just for the laughs, but I do think that this can be done properly. One could use the relative way this character is still unexposed (Because, come on, ask the average movie goer and you won't hear a squeak) while actually rewarding knowledgable people form the start of the film as they themselves get to catch glimpses of the thing following the mother-fucking film crew around, making it a meta movie. Got it? A movie was made about a woman who was seeing Slender Man, but in between shots we can see (If we're aware of it) Slender Man stalking the motherfucking camera of the movie you're watching, which brings up the level of creepy to 11. Did you catch my drift?
That was, sort of, kind of, the premise to the EverymanHYBRID YouTube channel.TheIronRuler said:
If I may play Socrates for a minute here, I'm going to try and demand that you give me a better reason to consider any of these films worthy of my time, because I don't think you've really explained why you seem to like these films so much, or at least not in any way I can make sense of. I will note before I begin my argument that while I haven't seen any of these films, I have a general familiarity with 120 Days of Sodom and A Serbian Film, though I had not heard of Martys before.Clearing the Eye said:
So first, let's address the issue of these films in as far as they have coherent points to make. Or specifically, what insight they offer that I couldn't find somewhere else. You mention Sodom as addressing issues of fascism, capitalism, and consumerism, all topics which have been discussed at length by many of the greatest minds the world has ever known. Will it punch me in the face and rub my nose in its idea of the truth? Because I've got two points to make here.
First, it is highly improbable that I couldn't find a book or essay which would advocate exactly the same idea without punching me in the face (metaphorically or literally). The author would make his or her case, and I could draw a conclusion about the validity of the point. Nowhere in the this series of events would I have had to suffer any serious unpleasantness, which is not generally regarded as a part of the learning process, and my nose would not have been rubbed in anything. In fact, my general feeling is that someone who has chosen to make a point by rubbing your nose in something, has done so because they either lack the evidence to make their point, or the intelligence to assemble their evidence into a coherent case... and instead they have opted for a blunter more caveman like approach.
Secondly I would point out that the assertion that it would rub my face in the one and only truth is a pretty ballsy statement. I have a great love for the now passed Christopher Hitchens, and I remember while reading one of his books he shared his belief that the most honest of intellectual statements are always accompanied by the acknowledgement that they could in fact be wrong. I wholeheartedly agree, and if you care to examine my language you'll find that I almost always leave myself the sort of loophole which would account for the possibility of my being wrong. I feel I have good reason for this too, because as the great Bill Maher (who is not known for the humbleness of his own opinions) once put it, "history is a litany of people getting shit dead wrong." And that's not just dumb people either, take for instance the infamous case of Kepler's model of the universe, or Aristotle's theory of the elements. These were smart people, making well thought out cases, and they could not have been more wrong.
So when you make the assertion that a film is going to punch me in the face and rub my nose in the truth, and that this is a good thing which I should want to have happen to me, I am inclined to think that you might not be the sort of person I should take life advice from.
I am also curious about any other themes which might've been running through Sodom which you didn't mention or perhaps didn't catch. I'm going to make a bold assumption here, which is that the movie is based on DeSade's book of the same name and nearly identical plot. DeSade's book is widely considered one of the most misogynist works of all time, which made it a favorite of the Surrealists, like Dali, Magritte, Selliman, and Bellmer. While I can't speak for the movie, I can say with some confidence that DeSade's original piece was less a metaphor for the social ills of the day, and more a sadomasochistic fantasy, which explains why the Surrealists (who had a well documented loathing of women) loved it, but doesn't explain why someone would choose to use it as the narrative frame for a story about the evils of Hitler and the Burger King.
I feel your description of why A Serbian Film should be on my watch list can be broken down in much the same way. Robert Hughes' The Shock of the New is also about art and what defines culture. With its focus on the modernist movement one couldn't argue that it doesn't discuss the pushing of limits. And in discussing the various pieces of art Hughes highlights, it touches on most of the other topics you mention. But even if it didn't, I could find discussions of all those topics in other places, all without having to watch anyone get raped or tortured. Considering that then, I'm curious what such a plot element could possibly add for me.
As for Martys, I can't say your description tempts me in any way shape or form. I get to reuse my earlier joke again, by pointing out that I'd actually rather not be "slapped in the face like a truck," and that if someone tried to sell me a product based on such a promise I would think he was batshit crazy. I would pay extra for the version which doesn't slap me like any sort of motorized vehicle... or even like an angry five year old for that matter. I just don't want to get slapped. So Martys can offer the greatest twist in the universe, but until it promises to keep its hands to itself and act civilized, I'll stick to lesser twists which don't necessitate unpleasantness. I also have no need for a "remorseless, unapologetic, and brutal" metaphor. I have a preference for metaphors which don't describe themselves with the same adjectives used by the metal bands I listened to when I was sixteen.
As to the assertion that it will leave me wondering what the very purpose of existence is, I've been doing that since I was twelve, and have actually gotten pretty good at it. Incidentally, I achieved this non-goal without having to watch the brutalization of others. You can start to question the purpose of existence from watching something as beautiful as Carl Sagan's Cosmos, and you'll get to learn lots of cool (if at this point out of date) sciencey stuff too. Does Martys have cool sciency stuff? Because that might be a deal breaker.
If the implication I've been working at here hasn't made itself clear enough yet, I'll go ahead and state it anyways, because I actually am curious to see if you can convince me otherwise, and I wouldn't like for an interesting question to get lost because I didn't bother to state it clearly. I have done my best here to construct a case whose point is that all of the things which you claim to like about these movies (the one exception being getting punched or slapped... which is apparently a selling point?) can be found in other media forms. Assuming (quite possibly incorrectly) that my case is valid, the implication then is that there is actually something else about these movies which speaks to you, and which probably says quite a bit about who you are as a person. Can you explain to me why it is that you feel this particular form of media is superior for making points about these issues, because if you can't then I'd have to say that the ultra-violence as a tool is not justified, and its use in a film explained because the ultra-violence itself attracts an audience with a specific psychological predisposition.
Finally, I would like to take a second to focus on the closing line of your argument, "they go where people don't want to, tell it like it is, and make you sick -- and you deserve it." I could talk forever about the implications of such a line, but I don't think I have to. So instead I'm just going to ask if you really think that... if you really think that people deserve to feel sick, and if you do for what crime you feel they deserve to feel sick? Or did you simply speak without thinking?
---
And now, in one of the most jarring transitions to On Topic in the history of the universe, let me state my humble opinion that a Slender Man film would probably not turn out well. Part of what made the original unique was the format itself. The series of Youtube videos made it feel like there actually was this kid, posting videos at random intervals as he was coming into contact with this monster. I really doubt that a feature length film could capture the feeling of the original videos, so I'm going to vote nay on the Slender Man found footage movie idea.
.Loop Stricken said:
Really? Well I hoped that if you put it on the big screen it would have a bigger area of effect.
Well, I wish you luck. Marble Hornets was more comedy than horror. OH NO A KID IN THE CORNER IN SKULL FACE PAINT!! RANDOM BOTTLES OF PILLS!
It's silly.
It's silly.
.BaronUberstein said:
It could always appear horrifying while still being silly, it all depends on how well you spot things that are out of place in the shot.
There's already a film based on Slender Man, it's called Marble Hornets and it's absolutely horrifying.
This, frankly, simply sounds like another Blair Witch Project -- which isn't a good thing.
This, frankly, simply sounds like another Blair Witch Project -- which isn't a good thing.
Sorry, but I'm not going to find a random guy w/ no face and a kid in face paint to be "scary" unless they're waving a gun around and are in the same room as me.TheIronRuler said:
If done right it could be pretty creepy, with slender man appearing in the background, perhaps puppet master, perhaps just letting things play out until they stop going his way.
Personally, however, I think an idea with more promise would be a TV series following the SCP foundation. Not only would that be an awesome series itself, but there's room for other creepypastas to be explored there. SCP has dealt with internet/memetic hazards before, why wouldn't there be room for slendy to become SCPs greatest target and threat? Perhaps an SCP connected to the russian sleep experiment? Haunted pokemon cartridges, paintings that make people commit suicide, many of the internet's greatest creepy stories could easily fit within SCP's continuity.
Personally, however, I think an idea with more promise would be a TV series following the SCP foundation. Not only would that be an awesome series itself, but there's room for other creepypastas to be explored there. SCP has dealt with internet/memetic hazards before, why wouldn't there be room for slendy to become SCPs greatest target and threat? Perhaps an SCP connected to the russian sleep experiment? Haunted pokemon cartridges, paintings that make people commit suicide, many of the internet's greatest creepy stories could easily fit within SCP's continuity.
.BaronUberstein said:
Should I give him skittles instead?
.
.
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It's not shock value. That's the beauty in it, you're not supposed to see the monster unless you really look for it, and then you're rewarded as an audience member.
Rather than use shaky (aka shitty) cam to avoid direct shots of the slender man, why not have the slender man, by power of the plot, actually grab the camera and become the camera man? That way you get lots of fear reactions from the college kids whenever the camera is on them, and the only glimpses that the audience gets of the main monster will be from brief reflections on bits of the scenery?
What monster? It's just a guy with no face. Whoop-de-freaking do.TheIronRuler said:
Maybe I just don't "get" the horror scene, but unless something is actually threatening to me, I don't get scared...
.Grant Stackhouse said:
That's fucking brilliant, but I don't know how it would work since Slender-Man doesn't really.. work... that... way... I'm not sure! I think we need more people on this idea. It sounds great, I'm just not sure HOW to execute it and if it works with the lore.
.
.BaronUberstein said:
He's always there. Watching. Waiting for you to lose your guard. You're not sure at first he's there, it might be your imagination. He was created on the internet, there's no way he's real... or is there?