Streaming sadists drawn to a tasteless horror that was offensive in more ways than one

Horror has always been known to court controversy in an effort to turn notoriety into tangible financial rewards, but the release of 2018’s schlocky supernatural chiller Slender Man turned out to be tasteless and offensive in more ways than one.

Director Sylvain White’s studio-backed genre movie came to theaters only four years after the notorious incident that saw a young girl lured into the woods by two of her friends where she was stabbed 19 times. As you can imagine, there was a lot of backlash at the time – with the father of one of the children involved in the attack protesting the existence of the Slender Man film as “extremely distasteful”, and it wasn’t screened in Milwaukee or Waukesha as a result.

Even those unaware of the somewhat questionable existence of the end product would have been furious, too, with Slender Man comfortably ranking as one of the worst high-profile horrors to come along in a long time. A critical score of only eight percent on Rotten Tomatoes is only slightly exceed by a 17 percent audience average, and yet it still managed to turn a profit after earning over $50 million at the box office.

There’s a very fine line between leaning into an online phenomenon as the basis for what was intended to be a zeitgeisty feast of frightening fare and being straight-up exploitative, and the jury was very much out on where Slender Man fell in that regard. Everyone can unanimously agree that is sucks, though, apart from maybe the brave Starz subscribers who’ve launched the awful creepypasta come to life onto the platform global most-watched list, per FlixPatrol. Everyone else is better off giving it the widest berth imaginable.