Horror has a history of provoking controversy in an effort to convert reputation into monetary gain, but the 2018 release of the schlocky supernatural chiller Slender Man turned out to be disrespectful and distasteful in numerous ways.
Only four years had passed since the infamous incident in which a young girl was taken into the woods by two of her friends and stabbed 19 times. The studio-backed horror film, directed by Sylvain White, was released in theatres. As you might expect, there was a lot of pushback at the time. The parent of one of the kids engaged in the attack protested the presence of the Slender Man movie, calling it "very unpleasant," and as a result, it wasn't shown in Milwaukee or Waukesha.
Slender Man ranks among the greatest high-profile horrors to emerge in a long time, so even people who were uninformed of the end product's dubious reality would have been incensed. Even with a 17 percent audience average and an eight percent Rotten Tomatoes score, it nevertheless managed to turn a profit after taking in more than $50 million at the box office.
The jury was still out on where Slender Man landed on the spectrum between using an online phenomena as the foundation for what was meant to be a zeitgeisty feast of spooky stuff and being outright predatory. The brave Starz subscribers who put the dreadful creepypasta come to life onto the platform's global most-watched list, according FlixPatrol, are perhaps the only ones who can admit that it stinks. Everyone else would benefit from giving it the broadest possible berth.
