Slender Man Is Coming: Creepypasta and Contemporary Legends on the Internet

by Trevor J. Blank, Lynne S. McNeill

Overview

The essays in this volume explore the menacing figure of Slender Man—the blank-faced, long-limbed bogeyman born of a 2009 Photoshop contest who has appeared in countless horror stories circulated on- and offline among children and young people. Slender Man is arguably the best-known example in circulation of “creepypasta,” a genre derived from “copypasta,” which in turn derived from the phrase “copy/paste.”
 
As narrative texts are copied across online forums, they undergo modification, annotation, and reinterpretation by new posters in a folkloric process of repetition and variation. Though by definition legends deal largely with belief and possibility, the crowdsourced mythos behind creepypasta and Slender Man suggests a distinct awareness of fabrication. Slender Man is therefore a new kind of creation: one intentionally created as a fiction but with the look and feel of legend.
 
Slender Man Is Coming offers an unprecedented folkloristic take on Slender Man, analyzing him within the framework of contemporary legend studies, “creepypastas,” folk belief, and children’s culture. This first folkloric examination of the phenomenon of Slender Man is a must-read for anyone interested in folklore, horror, urban legends, new media, or digital cultures.
 
Contributors: Timothy H. Evans, Andrea Kitta, Mikel J. Koven, Paul Manning, Andrew Peck, Jeffrey A. Tolbert, Elizabeth Tucker
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781607327813
Publisher:	Utah State University Press
Publication date:	09/21/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	216
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Trevor J. Blank is associate professor of communication at the State University of New York at Potsdam. He is the editor of Folklore and the Internet and Folk Culture in the Digital Age, coeditor of Tradition in the Twenty-First Century, and author of The Last Laugh: Folk Humor, Celebrity Culture, and Mass-Mediated Disasters in the Digital Age and Toward a Conceptual Framework for the Study of Folklore and the Internet. Follow him on Twitter: @trevorjblank.
 
Lynne S. McNeill is assistant professor of English in the Folklore Program at Utah State University, cofounder of the Digital Folklore Project, and author of Folklore Rules. Her research interests include legend, belief, fandom, and digital folklore. Follow her on Twitter: @lynneSmcneill.

Table of Contents

Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Fear Has No Face: Creepypasta as Digital Legendry / Trevor J. Blank and Lynne S. McNeill 1. "The Sort of Story That Has You Covering Your Mirrors": The Case of Slender Man / Jeffrey A. Tolbert 2. The Cowl of Cthulhu: Ostensive Practice in the Digital Age / Andrew Peck 3. "What Happens When the Pictures Are No Longer Photoshops?" Slender Man, Belief, and the Unacknowledged Common Experience / Andrea Kitta 4. "Dark and Wicked Things": Slender Man, the Folkloresque, and the Implications of Belief / Jeffrey A. Tolbert 5. The Emperor's New Lore; or, Who Believes in the Big Bad Slender Man? / Mikel J. Koven 6. Slender Man, H. P. Lovecraft, and the Dynamics of Horror Cultures / Timothy H. Evans 7. Slender Man Is Coming to Get Your Little Brother or Sister: Teenagers' Pranks Posted on YouTube / Elizabeth Tucker 8. Monstrous Media and Media Monsters: From Cottingley to Waukesha / Paul Manning Notes on the Authors Index

Editorial Reviews

“[A] timely volume of essays on an important topic—the contributors are doing groundbreaking folkloric work. By illuminating a contemporary phenomenon, these essays make us rethink our understandings of folkloric processes throughout history. The volume is perhaps one of the first dedicated to the Slender Man phenomenon (certainly the first by folklorists). . . . [T]he authors make significant contributions to theories of ostension, play, questions of real/fake, semiotics, community and individual creation, digital communication, cosplay, and transmedia studies.”
—Michael Dylan Foster, University of California, Davis

"This seminal work is a valuable read for people interested in legends, children’s folklore, or horror. Any folklorist particularly interested in ostensive practices, monsters, and digital folklore, to name a few, will find this work extremely useful."
—Western Folklore

"Slender Man is Coming is essential and enjoyable reading for anyone working on belief, legend, the folkloresque, and related topics, but it can be recommended more widely, too. The book would be a useful outreach tool to offer those outside the discipline who are unaware of folkloristic thinking about legend ostension and crime, as it offers a brilliant informed view on the relationship between online narratives and violence in real life."
—Folklore

"A valuable collection of the ongoing work to apply folkloristic concepts to the emerging field of discourse generated by the Internet. . . . The book is essential for legend scholars and for those documenting how tradition continues to penetrate and inform the Digital Revolution."
—Journal of Folklore Research

“Blank and McNeill's Slender Man Is Coming is remarkable for the approaches it opens up. . . . If the contributions in this excellent volume are to be taken as a guide, scholars of the speculative and the fantastic looking to study viral internet legends should be looking to folklorists for their cues.”
—The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts

From the Publisher