In an age where true crime documentaries seem to have an edge on crime movies (think Making A Murderer and The Jinx), it’s not hard to see why HBO want to keep this trend going.
They seem to be taking a different approach, however, with the release of the trailer for their latest guaranteed success Beware The Slenderman.
Everybody knows who Slenderman is – the creepy tall guy with no face and a sharp suit.
MDL70/FlickrEverybody also knows that he’s scary as hell, with his history of child abduction and all round nastiness.
Something about Slenderman captured the internet community’s curiosity after his appearance in a Something Awful forum in 2009 and his popularity surged, resulting in a cult indie game and various dramatisations of the myth.
What people didn’t bank on was that some people would take this seriously, and fall into the world of Slenderman to commit some terrible crimes.
FlickrOne of these crimes is the particular focus of Beware The Slenderman: the attempted murder of a 12 year old girl by her two classmates through stabbing in 2014.
The story exploded online and people were quick to rush to judgement of the situation, but this documentary seems to get to the heart of what went down.
It is a particularly grisly story in which the victim was stabbed 19 times in a woods in Wisconsin (everything weird in the U.S. seems to happen there), before she crawled to a nearby road and was picked up by a passer by.
The two girls attributed the crime to the need to appease the mythical bogeyman, and this is the subject of the documentary.
We suspect that this doc will be particularly hard to watch as we get to see into the psyche of two people who were completely taken in by such a dark story.
It’s safe to say this won’t be one to watch at night on your own.
Still, we’re really looking forward to having some light shed on one of the more messed up crimes of recent years.
