#CAMPFIRE LEGENDS THE LAST ACT STORY SERIES#Slenderman - like many popular horror film villains such as Leatherface in " The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," Jason Voorhees in "Friday the Thirteenth" and Michael Myers in the "Halloween" series - also has no facial features and therefore no identity. Variations have appeared in the popular "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" series (as the menacing "Gentlemen"), in legends and films such as "The Tall Man," and even, one could argue, in UFO folklore such as the "Men in Black." Why is Slenderman so compelling? The image of a thin, menacing and silent figure in a prim suit is iconic. Whether you blame the villain or not, Slenderman has captured people's attention. That concern gradually faded as games became more computer based in the past decade, the concern has been replaced by fears over violent video games, especially the "first-person shooter" games such as "Doom" and "Call of Duty." In the 1980s, a concern emerged over the influence of role-playing games such as "Dungeons and Dragons" and that players who adopt the roles of wizards, assassins and thieves might somehow come to believe they actually were those characters. Still, there's a tendency to assign responsibility to media, and especially the Internet, for acts of violence such as these. But blaming Slenderman for the violent act makes no more sense than blaming Lex Luthor or any fictional villain. In the wake of the stabbing, some have called for one of the websites the girls allegedly used for inspiration, Creepypasta, to be taken down. Of course, with tens (in some cases hundreds) of thousands of fans, a small percentage of them may, because of mental illness, the influence of drugs or for some other reason, take this fantasy world too far and have difficulty separating fact from fiction. #CAMPFIRE LEGENDS THE LAST ACT STORY TV#There's nothing unusual or inherently pathological about most forms of acting out fictional stories and legends it's similar to the cosplay ("costumed play") found among fans of science fiction and fantasy, in which people dress up and act out scenes from films and TV series such as "Star Wars," "Star Trek," " Harry Potter," "Firefly" and so on. Folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand, in his "Encyclopedia of Urban Legends" (ABC-CLIO, 2012), notes, "The concept of ostension applied to the study of urban legends recognizes that sometimes people actually enact the content of legends instead of merely narrating them as stories." Some people, however, engage in what folklorists call "ostension" or legend tripping, which is a form of legend transmission in which two or more people actually cast themselves in the story or legend, and play a role in it to some degree. Legendary figures such as Slenderman are essentially crowdsourced characters fans write horror fiction blogs about him, create faked photos featuring him and interact with him in online alternate reality games.įor most people, of course, it's harmless fun, and they take it no further. No longer locked in time and fixed in printed fiction, stories and legends spread around the world with a few keystrokes. People have told that sort of tale for millennia, but the emergence of the Internet provided a whole new forum for the spread of similar legends. When most people think of legends, and particularly urban legends, they may think of scary tales told around a campfire about hook-handed escaped killers lurking in the woods. Though this shady boogeyman was not created with the intent of having devotees kill in his name, he has gone through several online transformations over his virtual existence, CNN reports. He apparently exists solely to frighten people, especially children. He is mute and sometimes shown as having tentacles for arms. The fictional villain Slenderman was created in 2009 in an online forum and is depicted as a tall, thin, faceless evil entity dressed in a black-and-white suit.
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