Recently on August 10th, a new horror movie called “Slenderman” was released, based off of the spooky internet game created by Eric Knudsen (aka creepypasta). In this movie, four teenage girls Wren, Hallie, Chloe, and Katie, decide to summon a mythical creature of the name Slenderman, after hearing about this mysterious being lurking in the shadows of the Internet. Slenderman was believed to be a tall, lanky humanoid, without a face, often with a suit, and with creepy spider limbs emerging from his back. They perform a ritual one night and try to summon the ghostly figure to life. A couple of days after the summoning, Katie is found to be missing. This leads the rest of the three girls on a mission to discover what truly happened to their friend, and consider the possibility that Slenderman was involved in this kidnapping. The girls begin to have strange nightmares that slowly start to drive them insane. They start hallucinating horrifying images and experience severe paranoia, which is one of Slenderman’s brutal tactics to try and tap into their youthful minds. The girls experience fearful events to try and save their dear friend only to discover things keep deteriorating.

   In general, the movie reviews on this horror movie were very disappointing. Critics claimed this movie is poorly filmed with lousy lighting, minimal actual horrifying scenes, and dull visual and auditory effects. One critic exclaims, “There’s no tension and no suspense because even when the girls are panicked and screaming as Slender Man attacks them in their imaginations, we’re constantly yanked back to a fairly normal reality.” More critics go on to claim that this movie was created poorly, even that the Slenderman video game was more terrifying than the film itself. Others state that the storyline was super cliche; it’s just a simple supernatural chase story into the woods, and people begin to go missing. Nothing surprising, nor anything thrilling occurred in this simple horror movie, some blatantly expressed. On rotten tomatoes, this movie received an 11%, which in all honesty, is very poor.

   From my perspective, this movie was not anything like a freaky, eerie jump-scary movie. It was boring with a repetitive storyline with girls going in and out of the woods, in and out of houses, and getting chased by Slenderman in their imagination. At times, it was almost annoying and even made me lose interest. In some scenes, the lighting was extremely dark, without suspense or any intense action. Even when Slender Man showed his face, there were no hair-raising moments or anything that would make you jump out of your seat. In my opinion, the trailer was a complete scam and highlighted the movie to be way scarier than it truly was. I was expecting chills from this horror movie, but just got yawns instead.