True crime docu-drama series like “Making a Murderer” have been a big hit with audiences. Now, a new series that made its debut during SXSW may be your next crime mystery fix.
“Beware the Slenderman” features a true crime but with a very Internet-age twist – it will feature the Internet boogeyman himself, Slenderman, and how his influence on kids makes a very interesting case for how accessible the world wide web should be for impressionable young minds.
The documentary features the crimes of two teenage girls, Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier, who, in 2014, stabbed their 12-year-old friend, Payton "Bella" Leutner, 19 times in the woods. They later confessed to the murder, telling authorities that Slenderman told them to do so. The girls are currently awaiting trial as adults and the case was infamous for bringing the fictional character of Slenderman into the spotlight.
The HBO documentary will focus on the girls' obsession with Slenderman, but also on the difficult question of whether it is right to try them as adults. The producers of the documentary said that even as the film was being edited, new footage about Slenderman kept surfacing so the filmmakers wanted to incorporate as much current information on the popular Internet figure as they could to gain better understanding for the show.
The show will also release, for the first time, information about the girls, which thus far have been kept out of the headlines. For instance, it shows that Geyser is currently on schizophrenia medication. If found guilty of first degree homicide, both girls could face decades in prison.
Who Is Slenderman?
The character of Slenderman is an interesting facet to the case as well. He has very clear origins as a fictional character on the website Something Awful in 2009. As part of a Photoshop contest, he was a faceless figure with elongated arms and legs (sometimes with multiple octopus-like arms) and wore a suit. He was often placed into photos with children and sometimes captions underneath would imply that the children on the photo mysteriously vanished soon after.
A photo posted by @slenderman_sightings on Mar 19, 2015 at 6:47pm PDT
From his popularity on the Photoshop contest, he then spread to Internet forums like 4chan, and finally gained immense popularity as a regular monster on Creepy Pasta, a site where amateur writers could send in their horror stories to be read and given feedback from other horror fiction fans. Recently, it has been rumored that Slenderman may be the central theme of the next "American Horror Story" season 6.
The Slenderman Crime
Creepy Pasta is where the two girls apparently got all their information on Slenderman. According to official statements from the girls, they wanted to prove that Slenderman was real. Weier told the police in her statement that Slenderman was the leader of the Creepy Pasta website. And below him on the heirarchy were his killers. Below them were so-called “proxies.” Weier and Geyser wanted to become Slenderman's proxies but to do so, they believed they had to stab their friend to death and report to Slenderman himself, whom they believed lived in a mansion at Nicolet National Park.
Their initial plans went awry and when they left their victim on foot, she managed to crawl out of the woods where they abandoned her onto a nearby road. There, she was found by a man who called 911 and helped tend to her wounds until help arrived. The Creepy Pasta website issued a statement via Twitter when the case initially made headlines.
It's hard to express it well in a twitter status, but the families involved in the Wisconsin incident have my empathy, thoughts and prayer. — creepypasta.com (@creepypastacom) 3 June 2014
In the criminal complaint, Geyser was recorded by police saying, "It was weird that I didn't feel remorse." To which Weier added, "The bad part of me wanted her to die. The good part of me wanted her to live."
True Crime Documentary
More than featuring the crime itself, the documentary “Beware the Slenderman” also takes a long hard look at the consequences of the information available on the Internet and the power it wields. While some would describe the case as a crime of the digital and Internet age, film director Irene Taylor Brodsky does not believe so.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Brodsky shares her view that the crime did not necessarily happen because of the Internet meme.
“I think with a story that is this tragic, you want to blame someone or something. The Internet is not the enemy here. What is happening is it's this perfect storm of the developing brain and this visceral, dynamic impression that everything we find on the internet has on us,” she said.
She also shares that instead of blame, she hopes the documentary helps people to realize that, along with the advancements in technology and the Internet, young people should also be educated with the skills to discern what to do with the information they are bombarded with.
“For us, we used this film and this meme to talk about all the things that can go awry and how it's important to develop a certain amount of savvy about them. You just give them tools and you hope that they know how to use those tools early,” she explains when asked about her own kids and the Internet.
“Beware the Slenderman” is expected to air on HBO later in the year.
