Why Slenderman became a moral panic

What is the creepiest thing you’ve ever seen on the internet? For many people, it was Slenderman. This particularly lithe fellow started off as kind of a fun, spooky thing, and then of course got out of hand and caused a panic both on- and offline. We’re joined by Kaelyn Moore of Heart Starts Pounding to talk about his role taking creepypasta mainstream, and how Slenderman is still lurking in our cultural consciousness over 16 years since making his first appearance on Something Awful. Our guest Kaelyn Moore hosts Hearts Starts Pounding, a show about folklore and other creepy stuff, which you can find anywhere you listen to podcasts or @heartstartspounding on all the socials. Want to hear (and see!) our extended conversation? And enjoy other nice things like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to our Discord? Sign up for just five bucks a month at: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Life is all about making decisions. Sometimes you make questionable ones, like buying a new TV that's too big for the wall because the electronics store employee was a little too good at their job. Then sometimes you make great ones, like protecting your home and auto with Progressive. You get customized coverage options so you can be sure you have the right coverage. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers, not available in all states.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Hey, this is Grant, producer of Panic World. We don't do this very often, but there are so many more of you now. It seemed like we had to do a little housekeeping at the top of the show. If you are new and watching us on YouTube, please subscribe. We come out with episodes each week. Love for you to be here. If you want to get in touch with criticisms about Ryan or compliments about anything I say, you can reach us at grant@garbage day@gmail, grant@garbage day@gmail. If you're wondering why is my email a garbage day? It's probably because you don't know that Ryan has a newsletter called Garbage Day, which you can find at garbage day@gmail. It's very good. And if you are really liking what we're doing and want to do us some favors, you know what I'm going to say.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  You can review us on any platform. We are constantly fighting that people say we are too woke, so that helps. And if you want to give us $5 and get some extra material and just give us your money, patreon.com/panicworld. I very sincerely appreciate you all being here. It is wild how many more of you are here now than the last time I did this. And yeah, Slenderman.

• 1:43Ryan Broderick?

  I would love to start by asking, what is the creepiest thing you've ever seen on the internet?

• 1:48Speaker 03

  Oh, God. The creepiest thing has definitely been just like horrible, horrible. Untold violence that I've seen. Do you remember when Facebook like lifted the um, they had like a rules that you couldn't post dead people on Facebook anymore? And so everyone stopped doing that. And then they lifted it, but they didn't tell anyone that they lifted it. So all of a sudden, the next day, like everyone's feeds were flooded with like, I got beheading videos from like terrorist organizations and stuff. That was maybe the creepiest thing I've seen.

• 2:20Ryan Broderick?

  I remember that because like, we're basically just like one switch away from seeing the worst things ever on Facebook. Like, from what I understand is like, people are still posting all that stuff. We just don't see it.

• 2:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:47Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, we're very close to the edge. So that's a great example of something that no one should enjoy seeing. No one should have fun with that stuff. But there's some other stuff that is meant to be fun. And today, we're going to be talking about one of those things that really unites people, having fun with scary stuff, having fun with spooky stuff. And it is, it's a nice part of the internet until it gets out of hand. And this one really got out of hand. Today, we're going to be talking about Slender Man. We are finally talking about Slender Man. How it went from the good kind of scary to the bad kind of scary, the moral panic kind of scary. And we're going to look at why this meme took off and for better or worse, became one

• 3:31Ryan Broderick?

  of the defining totems of the internet age. My name is Ryan Broderick. Joining me as always is our producer Grant Irving, who will pop in from time to time. This is Panic World, a show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually, reality. A recent theme on the show has been the world flattening into lore and jokes and sort of a weird mix of fiction and nonfiction. I want to dive a bit deeper into it this week and next. We're going to be looking back at a moment where it feels like something started, where some kind of thing that we're now dealing with started.

• 4:09Ryan Broderick?

  And this is the moment when creepypasta went mainstream. Joining me is the host of Hearts Starts Pounding, creepypasta expert Slenderman Savant. Kaelyn Moore, hi, welcome to the show.

• 4:21Speaker 03

  Hello, that was the best intro I've ever gotten, thank you. Slenderman Savant.

• 4:25Ryan Broderick?

  Some real bona fides. Yeah. What is your, so you've said like, you know, you're the creepiest thing you've ever seen on the internet. But like, do you have a, when we're talking specifically about creepypasta, which for people who don't know, let me define it really quick. Copy pasta is when you copy and paste random texts from the internet over and over again until it becomes a meme. Creepypasta is effectively the like spooky supernatural equivalent of that. So do you have a favorite kind of creepypasta?

• 4:50Speaker 03

  I, I think honestly like Slenderman is one of my favorites. I liked the ones way back in the day that were like popping up on 4chan that felt like they were really community involved, where it was like the community building the lore. Sometimes it was just like an image that would pop up that someone had like photoshopped to make someone look really scary. And there was no context. And then the next person would kind of come in and be like, oh, this is Jeff the Killer. He's actually from.

• 5:14Ryan Broderick?

  Jeff the Killer.

• 5:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. And then you, all of a sudden, like the community is building on this lore. That has like in time kind of shifted into like the Reddit creepypastas where you just get like this big block of text. That's like a fully baked story. There's not as much community involvement in the lore. But I liked the ones like Slenderman and Jeff the Killer, even like more recently, the backrooms where the community is just kind of like building.

• 5:36Ryan Broderick?

  I love the backroom.

• 5:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, same.

• 5:38Ryan Broderick?

  I love the backroom.

• 5:39Speaker 03

  I want to go there.

• 5:40Ryan Broderick?

  I, I have a, yeah, I, I feel like I. Will you, will you tell us what the backroom is? So for people who aren't familiar with the backrooms, there will be a movie very shortly about them, actually, it turns out. It is basically like, what if you got stuck in another dimension? There was nothing but the back of like a convention center or a hotel forever. My favorite creepypasta, I wanted to double check if this even counts. And according to creepypasta.fandom.com, it does count. In 2008, there was a 4chan post. Are you familiar with Who Was Phone?

• 6:12Speaker 03

  I don't think I was familiar with that one. Wait, remind me.

• 6:15Ryan Broderick?

  So. I'm gonna read it because it seems like someone trying to do a creepypasta, but they were either like drunk or they like couldn't figure out how to do it right. So it reads, so you're with your honey and you're making out when the phone rings. This is all spelled wrong. You answer it and the voice is, what are you doing with my daughter? You tell your girl and she say, my dad is dead. Then who was phone?

• 6:44Speaker 03

  That's a good, that reminds me of the one that's been going around on Instagram right now. That's like the babysitter called the dad like late at night to say, hey, is your clown statue supposed to be moving? I put a blanket over it because your clown statue keeps moving like the whole night. And the dad says, leave the house now. You've disrespected my clown statue and I hate you.

• 7:07Ryan Broderick?

  That's great. Before we get to Slenderman, I want to spend some time talking about what came before he ended up as everyone's weird high school boyfriend's lazy Halloween costume. So if we're talking about creepypasta, we gotta go all the way back to sort of the beginnings of it. How familiar are you with 4chan as a website? Like, have you used it? Have you been on it? Are you a big poster on there?

• 7:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would say big poster, long time user. No, I think 4chan was one that I was maybe late to because I was a teen girl and not a teen boy. And I feel like it was really this like teen boy space when I was kind of growing up on the internet. But then like I would hear so many scary stories about stuff that was posted there. Scary stories and also just like real pictures and like people looking for other people and stuff. So then I just like would go on it to kind of be like, what is this thing that everyone's talking about? But not really like a poster or that much of a user of it. But I was reading like creepypastas on there.

• 8:03Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I was never a poster because I'm, I'm like normal. But it was, it was a thing to look at. And in 2007, 4chan starts a board called X. So like all the boards on 4chan have like letters, like that's the code for the board. This one was paranormal. It was started because of the popularity of a similar board on Like 4chan spinoff at the time called 7chan. And this is from a Daily Dot article about this. So Kesha, this is so like timestamped to the 2000s. Kesha flashes on the screen, five characters, a male voice repeats the pop star's name three times, enunciating carefully. This video has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times. It means something. And 4chan's paranormal discussion board X is going to figure out what?

• 8:49Ryan Broderick?

  If your experience on 4chan is limited to the racism, pornography, and trolling antics of the infamous B board, which is the random board, what happens on X may come as a surprise and it may just make you a believer. Okay, so that's one early example. And what's important is that these were getting popular. But as you can see in the article, they're pretty contained. And this is the swamp that Slenderman will rise out of, so to speak. So let's look at a couple scary trends that led that way. One you already brought up, Jeff the Killer.

• 9:17Speaker 03

  Bring him up.

• 9:19Ryan Broderick?

  You want, you want to see Jeff? Here, hold on.

• 9:21Speaker 03

  Jeff the Killer is so funny to me because it's like, it's so early creepypasta where it's clearly a 12 year old that just learned Photoshop and just blurred all of the features on someone's face. But it really is so, like, disconcerting.

• 9:36Ryan Broderick?

  I always thought this was a Photoshop of Boxi. Like the girl who was popular.

• 9:43Speaker 03

  Oh, like the rar?

• 9:44Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. I always thought this was like a scene girl from MySpace that someone photoshopped. Like that's, like, that was the head, like, the headcanon I had as a teenager. So like, I, I don't know why, like, I never, I never thought about Jeff the Killer as like a thing, other than just like, oh, that's a mean Photoshop of some girl.

• 10:00Speaker 03

  Oh, that's so interesting because I can't.

• 10:02Ryan Broderick?

  You can even see her straightened bangs.

• 10:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, you do see like the, the boxed, dyed black hair. That's been like straightened. Yeah, yeah, actually it does kind of look like a little bit like Boxi.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  Can one of you just describe what we're looking at without insulting Boxi more? My, my one true love?

• 10:19Ryan Broderick?

  So it's a, it's a face. It's been stretched into sort of like a Joker smile. There's no nose. The eyes have been really hollowed out. And yeah, Jeff the Killer has like emo bangs, kind of like straightened black emo hair.

• 10:34Speaker 03

  But also the angle that the photo is taken, it seems like this person was taking a selfie of themselves like in their closet. And they're also maybe wearing headphones. Like this actually could just be a teenager that someone took the photo of and photoshopped.

• 10:48Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, so this is Jeff the Killer. And Jeff the Killer is probably before Slenderman, other than Slenderman, one of the most infamous pieces of creepypasta.

• 10:58Ryan Broderick?

  And I think the culture of X at this point in the early 2000s, mid 2000s, is like very innocent, would you say? Does that feel right to sort of say like, it didn't feel organized?

• 11:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, did it even have like a shape at this point where people were building lore of like images that were being posted? I don't even know that like creepypasta was really part of the lexicon on like that message board at the time.

• 11:23Ryan Broderick?

  From my own memories, I feel like it was really tied to jump scare culture, like the idea that like a webpage would load and there'd be like something gross or scary on there.

• 11:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:32Ryan Broderick?

  I remember there were like, there was a Korean comic site that made like screamer comics, where like you would scroll and there'd be like a scary image in the comic. Like that was big at the time.

• 11:40Speaker 03

  Oh, interesting.

• 11:41Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it was all kind of about like trolling.

• 11:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, I remember, I want to, this was probably even before this, but like going on Ebomb's World and just seeing, just trying to like find those, like the famous one, that's the Swedish commercial where like the goblin pops up and just screams at you in the middle of like the car commercial. But they were like, or like you're playing a maze game and then like just a face pops up and screams at you. Like, I remember trying to seek out those videos, like that, for a while, that was like the horror of the internet. Like if you wanted to find scary videos, they kind of all were like that jump scare type of video.

• 12:16Ryan Broderick?

  And, and I feel like a lot of it was tied also to like the feeling of being up late at night at a computer. Like there was a, there was, the internet just like felt like a creepier thing.

• 12:27Speaker 03

  It did, because you didn't know the origin of any of this stuff. And when you're a kid, it feels like it really could have come from anywhere. Like, the image of Jeff the Killer, like, when you're 13, that really could be someone that lives in a basement in Japan that, you know, has been there for however. Like you just have no context for these things. Like, oh, this is probably just like a seen girl someone photoshopped is not really like what you're thinking. But it was just so fun back in the day, because like, you just didn't know where any of this stuff was coming from. So it all felt more real.

• 12:56Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it felt like it had almost always existed in a way. What is really interesting about this period of time is that like very quickly, you start to actually get lore and you start to get community building. So in, in summer 2007, 4chan is getting really popular. And someone makes a post about what they're calling SCP-173. Are you familiar with the SCPs? Do you know about this?

• 13:19Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Will you remind me? I, it's been honestly like, I'm a little rusty.

• 13:23Ryan Broderick?

  SCP stands for Special Containment Procedure. And it's effectively like a crowdsourced version of the X-Files. So like you come up with something creepy or scary or silly, some kind of like weird sci-fi idea. And then you add it to this ongoing list of, you add it to the list of SCPs all over the internet.

• 13:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think this was maybe when I was like still a little young to be using 4chan.

• 13:48Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I mean, everyone should be too young to use.

• 13:50Speaker 03

  That is so true. That's, yeah. You should be 10 on 4chan.

• 13:55Ryan Broderick?

  One thing that I find interesting is that some were written as like manuals and they were like intentionally boring and kind of dry. But there's a pretty big one that actually just stole a whole concept from Doctor Who. It's like really boring instructions for an object that like kills you if you blink, which is literally the plot of a Doctor Who episode called Blink. And it's written like job instructions, basically like you're working at this facility with this otherworldly supernatural entity. But there's an attempt to add reality to it, to make it feel real by being boring.

• 14:28Speaker 03

  That's still kind of something that shows up a lot in creepypasta is like you show up to a job, you show up to a new apartment or whatever, and then you're just handed a list of rules that maybe don't make sense to you.

• 14:38Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, I have to imagine that most creepypasta is written and shared by teenagers still. And I think almost every teenager can relate to the experience of like showing up at a job. I mean, like, I don't know what's going on and everyone else seems to know what's going on. My instinct is that good, popular creepypastas do kind of reveal something relatable and interesting about like particularly the teenage experience.

• 15:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:04Ryan Broderick?

  I used to stock shelves at like an Olympia sports and like that, there could have been a weird monster in the back room. Like that's a very, feels very relatable to me.

• 15:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:13Ryan Broderick?

  Two years after the boring on purpose stuff, we got Slenderman, which takes all the teen vibes and makes it exciting and versatile for better and for worse. So Slenderman was invented on Something Awful. Now, obviously, you were a teen girl, so you might not have also been following Something Awful at the time. Are you familiar with the site at all?

• 15:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:30Ryan Broderick?

  Okay. I was a big, I was more of a Something Awful person than I was a 4chan person. I like to read all the stuff on there.

• 15:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, because it was more like just this kind of like creepypasta stuff, right? There like, there wasn't as many, oh, right. It wasn't like as many like people dying, if my memory serves me.

• 15:48Ryan Broderick?

  No, it was like a, it was like a fairly normal message board. Yeah. And it had like writers and stuff.

• 15:53Speaker 03

  Right, right, yeah.

• 15:55Ryan Broderick?

  The first Slenderman posts start in 2009. Eric Nudson, he posting under the name Victor Surge makes a submission to one of the Something Awful Photoshop contests, which they were having all the time. And he, he basically puts like a skinny, tall figure in the back of stock photos and then adds like 80s newspaper headlines. And he refers to it as the Slenderman. And it starts very similarly to the SCPs. It sort of starts as this like idea that everyone's adding lore to Slenderman. And it starts to spread from there. And I remember seeing the original post and being totally freaked out.

• 16:39Speaker 03

  I remember this feeling like the first one that was completely like could totally be real. Like, we were laughing about Jeff the Killer just looking like someone with amateur Photoshop skills, kind of trying to make something scary. But this felt professional, like he looks totally real in the backs of these photos where he's standing like, and the photos are all of children looking really concerned too. So it looks like. He was actually just in the back of these photos and the kids knew he was there. And it's, it's very terrifying. And I think from the beginning, it basically took off and became this huge thing.

• 17:16Ryan Broderick?

  The one we're looking at right now is like a children's birthday. And then there's just like a guy in the background behind the trees.

• 17:23Speaker 03

  Barely behind the trees. Yeah.

• 17:25Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. And if I remember that the original sort of idea was that these are the last photos taken of these children. If you look at the photo, like the last photo taken of someone, there's just like a tall man in the back looking really creepy.

• 17:40Speaker 03

  This is a format that is still so popular today. Like, how many YouTube videos are like three photos that are like three of the last photos taken before someone died? Like three photos with a terrifying backstory. Like, it's just kind of something that's always been popular. And that's exactly what these photos take, feel like. It's like someone took this photo before something horrible happened. And as the viewer, like you can see the impending thing.

• 18:04Ryan Broderick?

  It's like a very teenage kind of feeling, like the last photo you'll ever take with someone kind of thing. Like, is, I don't know, there's something, there's something romantic about a lot of these tropes in a way, like very teen, angsty and romantic.

• 18:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's interesting. I didn't think about it that way. I think like, for me, as humans, like ritual is so important to us. And a lot of times we don't like, understand the rituals we perform, but we like, like I think about like religion, like I grew up Catholic. Like, there's so many rituals and you're also taught that like, if you don't do the ritual the right way, you could go to hell, like something really horrible could happen. And it doesn't matter if you understand it or not, or if you agree with it, but like you have to do this ritual.

• 18:42Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, like a back room is scary if you like get stuck, if you like open the wrong door in a hotel and then you're like stuck there forever. Like, that's scary. Like, because I remember the first time I entered the back room of a hotel and I was like, uh-oh, am I in trouble? Like, is there an alarm gonna go? Like, a lot of the more popular creepy pauses all have that kind of like, young person entering the world for the first time. And entering the world for the first time as a young person is a horror story. Like, it genuinely is.

• 19:09Speaker 03

  You don't know the rules of how the world works and you're scared of like breaking them because you don't understand them. And then this, in this world, if you do, there's like dire consequences.

• 19:18Ryan Broderick?

  It's like folk horror created by teens to like express that, which I think is cool. I think it's a cool thing.

• 19:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, I totally agree.

• 19:26Speaker 01

  What was your first like encounter with Slenderman and what lore did you first hear?

• 19:31Speaker 03

  I don't remember exactly where I saw them, but I remember them being passed around by like kids at my high school. So I saw those and I remember the like ancientness lore, the like, oh, he's been seen in Germany. He was seen in Mesopotamia. Like there's references to Slenderman in the Bible, like that kind of ancientness lore, I think was like the part that really scared me the most, that he's always been here, wearing that suit.

• 19:56Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, there are definitely a few agreed upon things, like the design of Slenderman is like even kind of debated. Like there's some with tentacles, there's some with not, there's someone, he's, he's nine feet tall, there's someone, he's, he's just like a tall guy. You, you end up with like kind of this uneasy middle ground of a bunch of different ideas. I think it's just a natural consequence of using the internet to tell stories is that like anyone can go and take it. I mean, we did an episode about QAnon and QAnon had like a similar problem where like no one could really agree on what QAnon was or was about. Anything successful has to be interactive, but anything interactive is inherently chaotic and thus can't really succeed long term. It's a, it's a, it's a weird problem of the internet age.

• 20:40Speaker 03

  There's like rules to folklore too, spanning back thousands of years, but like some of the rules of folklore is it has to change based on the, like even if it's an agreed upon story, like a witch that lives in the local woods or whatever, like it has to change based on the audience you're telling it to. And it changes based on like the region you're in. Like there are like certain elements of even folklore where it's not canonized and it's never been canonized. Like that's just how we share stories as people. But that's what helps it spread because when you're talking to a group of children, you're like editing the story a little bit to make it specifically scary to them. And when you're telling your neighbor, you're editing the story a little bit to make it specifically stick with them. So it just like helps it spread.

• 21:24Speaker 03

  And that's probably the same, I would imagine the same with Slenderman. It's like so many little pieces of his backstory and his.

• 21:32Speaker 04

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• 22:03Speaker 05

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• 22:28Speaker 03

  Appearance just changed, and that's probably just depending on like the medium he's being shared in.

• 22:33Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, I would, yeah, I would say like it, you know, we're going to talk more about the sort of like meme life of it after the break, but I do think the fact it was part of a Photoshop battle is important for understanding why it became so popular, which is that you can just like easily put Slenderman in the back of a weird photo you find, and like that's kind of the whole meme. Like there's, there's something interactive about it from the jump.

• 22:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, and this is also at the time, because what is this, 2009 that he comes out? It's like the time, yeah, it's the time when people are like laypeople can download Photoshop on their computer. It's just this fun thing that like everyone can partake in and then upload the photos and add a little bit of lore to the story.

• 23:15Ryan Broderick?

  So the stage is set for this to blow up. Creepypasta has been around long enough to build like a pretty active community. The internet is changing and Slenderman was just this like simple menacing skinny guy in the woods taking children away. And now he's about to haunt all of America. But first, a word from our sponsors.

• 23:34Speaker 03

  Suits for tall men.

• 23:37Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, tall men's suits.

• 23:44Ryan Broderick?

  Alright, so we're gonna start by watching a video. Part one of a little series called Marble Hornets.

• 23:50Speaker 03

  Okay, so it's black. It says, "Entry number one. After viewing a couple of tapes of Finding Nothing Unusual, I came across a clip that doesn't fit in with the others. From what I can tell, the following footage takes place inside Alex's house, not the set for Marble Hornets." The audio has been removed. Either the microphone was disabled at the time or it was taken out afterwards. Okay, that's all against a black screen. So it's someone holding a camcorder, walking through a house. It keeps cutting out, or like peering through a window, looking at the outdoors. Oh god. Oh yeah, and so, okay, so Slenderman is standing on the-

• 24:23Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, it worked on me. It still works on me.

• 24:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, I actually like got goosebumps.

• 24:27Ryan Broderick?

  So let's, let's go back to Mr. Slenderman right here. Yeah, there he is. So like-

• 24:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, he looks at the camera. It's this tall man with like the white face, standing on the porch, and then he like sees the camera and he looks at it, and that's when the camera ducks away.

• 24:43Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it's so well done. So Marble Hornets is a, the first attempt at turning Slenderman into something more than just a Photoshop. It was created in June, pretty quickly after Slenderman like first went on Something Awful. He was a film student and a user on Something Awful. It was really well constructed on YouTube where like YouTube couldn't be used to watch like linear programming yet, so they hid the videos on different channels across the web. So like it, I remember like spending an afternoon once in college, like watching all of them, and the feeling of like going on an internet like scavenger hunt to find the next installment of Marble Hornets,

• 25:24Ryan Broderick?

  like made me feel like I was part of it in this way that I, I've never really experienced since.

• 25:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like that sleuth thing. Like you have to be the one to kind of uncover the hidden message by like finding all the videos and stuff.

• 25:35Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly. And funnily enough, it got so popular that even Roger Ebert tweeted about it.

• 25:43Speaker 03

  Okay, a man that recognizes good cinema even thinks it's cool. Okay.

• 25:48Ryan Broderick?

  He, he wrote, "Marble Hornets: A YouTube Serial. A Forsaken Indie Film Meets Paranormal." All episodes to date. And then he linked to like a, like a URL shortener that doesn't work anymore.

• 25:58Speaker 03

  And when is this? It's like 2009, 2010. So this is even before like the paranormal activities.

• 26:05Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly, yeah. Adds to the creepiness, I think, quite a bit.

• 26:08Speaker 03

  But also, it's like a time when that's all people had to film for YouTube. Like, we only had our weird point-and-shoot cameras. Like, I consume so much paranormal content on Reddit now. And the biggest complaint is always like, "Why is this shot on a potato?" Like, "Why are the paranormal images and videos always shot on these horrible camcorders?" And that's a legitimate concern now, because we have these amazing cameras to capture content on. But back then, you could just put up a grainy image. You can't even see anything in it, and people are trying to find the ghosts in the image. Because that's all we had. It lent itself to YouTube in this really fun way that just doesn't work anymore.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  I think that ties into the scavenger hunt of it all. It's like, it was grainy cameras, and also you still had to search for it. And could both of you just kind of describe the experience of what it was like to hunt and watch these in small clips? And how that affected the viewing and what you knew you were watching and just the lore of it all?

• 27:05Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I mean, I remember where I was. I was working in the school paper, and I used to just hang out in the office, because they had a better TV and better computers than I did. So I would just sit there and fart around the internet. And I remember being past marble hornets somehow. And I started clicking through and watching them. And as I was watching them, the sun went down, but I was so enraptured that I forgot to turn the lights on. So I was sitting by the third or fourth video in a completely dark room, just clicking around YouTube. And it felt like the internet was haunted. And my friend, I think, walked in at one point, and he sat down and started watching. And it just creeped the hell out of us. It was so effective, yeah.

• 27:47Speaker 03

  Like, today, as someone that uses YouTube and posts on YouTube, if you were to try something like that, you're gonna get the audience yelling at you in the comments for not delivering all of the content to them immediately, because that's just how the internet is constructed now. But you could... Do those kinds of like scavenger hunts back then.

• 28:05Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, kids today are just too lazy to find their own creepypasta. It's very sad. The Gen Z, you know, they're too busy vaping and getting lead poisoning. So by 2010, Slenderman is now like a bona fide internet meme. It's showing up on like UFO forums. All of the creepiest sides of the internet are really into this. They've settled on Slenderman as like a title and they start to codify his abilities. Do you remember like the early, you mentioned the tentacles, but do you remember like the early versions of Slenderman? Like, what's his deal?

• 28:39Speaker 03

  He can communicate with you via like telepathy. He's telepathic. There's like an ancientness to him and he stole children. That was like a big part of the lore too, was he was like a Pied Piper type of creature.

• 28:55Ryan Broderick?

  Yes. Marble Hornets, I think adds in this idea that like he slowly drives you insane. Like his appearances like make you go crazy. And yeah, the big thing is like he's always associated with like missing children.

• 29:09Speaker 03

  Which, mind you, also is like every folklore story ever. Like we have folklore going back thousands of years that references someone stealing children. It's probably the most famous trope in all of folklore. So I think that just kind of added to the like familiarness. I don't know. I feel like Slenderman has like, he has like this ancient type of folklore lore that starts getting built about him. He has this like Lovecraftian style look and he also is like built into the internet. So he kind of like hits these three levels of like he's modern, he's antique and he's ancient.

• 29:45Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. And in the way that like the, like any good internet meme just sort of like sucks up culture and spits it back out. Like his look is very Men in Black. Like it's very, it's a million remixes and riffs all happening simultaneously. But then open enough that people can just like play around with it. Which I think if it, if it had entered, you know, fully formed, I don't think it'd be as popular. Like I think you kind of need the interactivity.

• 30:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:10Ryan Broderick?

  For anything on the internet to work.

• 30:11Speaker 03

  And he's basic enough that you can dress like him for Halloween in a pretty. Low budget way, which is ki- I mean, I come from like TV and film. We talk about that all the time. Like when you're coming up with like costumes or like outfits for characters like you, the costume ability of something really lends itself to the success of a character.

• 30:28Ryan Broderick?

  I knew a Juggalo in college who was really into smoking salvia and he dressed like Slenderman for Halloween one year. And I was like, yep, that sounds right.

• 30:35Speaker 03

  And I bet it was

• 30:35Ryan Broderick?

  That's like the exact

• 30:36Speaker 03

  easier than dressing like a Juggalo, like doing the face paint and stuff.

• 30:40Ryan Broderick?

  Sure, probably. I mean, that's not really a costume for him. Like he takes off his mask and then underneath is his true face.

• 30:46Speaker 03

  It's a culture. Yeah, of course.

• 30:47Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 30:48Speaker 03

  I apologize to our community.

• 30:49Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  I've caught Ryan saying that on the show so many times. This might be the first time. He just tries to talk about Juggalos. Every episode, he's like, do you know that the real face of Juggalos?

• 31:01Ryan Broderick?

  I did wear the Juggalo face paint once and I did feel very like free. I felt like, oh, I could just like do whatever I want. I could huff as much gasoline as I want now, you know?

• 31:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, there is part of me that wants to go do ketamine in the forest at the Juggalo concert and that they do in Ohio.

• 31:16Ryan Broderick?

  I think we could do another episode. We could go.

• 31:19Speaker 03

  Put it on the business card.

• 31:20Speaker 01

  Courier, our new overlords, can we, uh, can we get the budget to go to the gathering?

• 31:24Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Courier news, if you're, if you're listening, I want a Huff Duster dressed like a Juggalo at the Gathering of Juggalos in Minneapolis next year. So, okay, by, by the fall of 2009, like this is actually moving, it's kind of astounding how fast this is moving for, for like pre-Facebook-y internet. Like this is pretty quick. We're talking a span of barely six months from the first post on Something Awful to Cultural Touchstone.

• 31:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was hard to go viral back then on the internet. You didn't have moms on Facebook just reposting stuff.

• 31:55Ryan Broderick?

  Actually, a couple of years ago, I was trying to figure out like how, like the earliest bits of viral content, like what were they and how do they move around the internet for this project I was working on for The Verge? And it, it used to be that like what now takes like two or three days in the 2000s, used to take like a year, if not like a year and a half.

• 32:13Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 32:13Ryan Broderick?

  Like Rick Rowling took like almost two years to kind of really break.

• 32:17Speaker 03

  It's like the Oregon Trail. Like, it's like the, the old ways of travel and now we have airplanes. Yeah, wow.

• 32:24Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly. So Slenderman is moving in a very modern, quick way. By the fall of 2009, we get the first video game, which is a Java-built browser game called Slender Invasion. I will show you it because it's fascinating. It's also in Spanish, so we've gone global by this point. Yeah, it's like a crappy

• 32:47Speaker 03

  It is so

• 32:48Ryan Broderick?

  game where you shoot Slenderman.

• 32:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, and you, oh, you shoot him. That's kind of sad.

• 32:52Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 32:54Speaker 03

  You're like working for the military and you, your mission is to shoot Slenderman.

• 32:58Ryan Broderick?

  And this won't be the last game. This is called Slender the Eight Pages and it's, it seems like a, like a reskin of like Myst or like, you know, one of those like point and click puzzle games. Then you like see Slenderman in the woods.

• 33:12Speaker 03

  It feels very analog. It's like what I want from a Slenderman game.

• 33:15Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly. This is also when we started to get our first bit of like media pickups. So the earliest news article we could find about Slenderman. It's from the Star Tribune. Fun fact.

• 33:28Speaker 03

  Classic.

• 33:29Ryan Broderick?

  So this is from the Minnesota Star Tribune and it reads, "He is the Slenderman, a mythical predator and internet sensation whose greatest skill is the ability to strike terror in the hearts of teens who aren't frightened by much else." Which I feel like is now just how you could describe like any popular YouTuber, you know, like he's a mythical predator and internet sensation. So.

• 33:50Speaker 03

  And his whole crew, man.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  He looks more like Slenderman every day.

• 33:58Ryan Broderick?

  Let's bleep, let's bleep the names so people guess who, who you just talked about.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  You can guess it because he keeps looking like Slenderman and he keeps giving you chocolate.

• 34:07Ryan Broderick?

  That could be a lot of them. I think a lot, a lot of, a lot of influencer men look like Slenderman by the end.

• 34:12Speaker 03

  The more famous you get on YouTube, the more you look like Slenderman. We just know this.

• 34:16Ryan Broderick?

  You become like tall and weird looking. Yeah. Um, so the, the article reads, he's one of the scariest things out there, said Dan Hughes, a senior at Matto Meddy High School. Sometimes when I'm in the basement, I tell myself, don't think about Slenderman. And of course, the more I try not to, the more I do. Hughes said that this violent shockfests like Saw and Hostel have nothing on the Slenderman. Those kinds of things are more about gore, which I don't find scary, Hughes said. The Slenderman imagery uses psychology to make you scare yourself if you think too much about it. Which I actually do think is kind of exactly why Slenderman works.

• 34:52Speaker 03

  Oh, totally.

• 34:53Ryan Broderick?

  Do you ever play the Bloody Mary game?

• 34:55Speaker 03

  Of course. It's like, the more you speak it into existence, the more it's going to happen. And so you don't want to speak it into existence. And that makes you kind of like, think about it more and talk about it more. Yeah.

• 35:03Ryan Broderick?

  This, like, this article has like, an interesting observation, which I hadn't really thought about until reading it, which is that the Slenderman's getting popular right at the peak of torture porn in Hollywood. So it's like, it's very clearly the beginning of a shift away from what was popular in horror. And so like, this would also be the moment the internet is full of enough people that we can start to like, make our own culture, like, without Hollywood. So it's like, it's interesting to me that this is all happening simultaneously.

• 35:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's interesting. I actually never thought about it that way. That, yeah, they're, maybe the stuff that they're watching is tired. And so they're kind of coming up with their own horror that can exist and go viral on its own.

• 35:46Ryan Broderick?

  Which probably explains why, another reason why it went viral, which is like, people are just bored of what they're seeing on TV and in movies.

• 35:53Speaker 03

  And I don't know the next thing that happened after this article came out, but I'm going to guess that this was maybe the first time parents learned about Slenderman, and it just made it absolutely viral amongst, like, all culture now. Not just the, like, people reading about it on the message boards.

• 36:14Ryan Broderick?

  You are correct, because this is, this is the exact moment. So this is the turning point. So the problems start when this starts to break containment. All of a sudden, it's not people who are like in the creepypasta world that are encountering Slenderman. The creator from the Something Awful Forum, he's being interviewed about why Slenderman is suddenly everywhere. A Slenderman knockoff called Enderman is added to Minecraft in 2011. In 2012, a free survival game, the second one I showed you launches. It's played on stream by a big YouTuber. And then this happens.

• 36:45Speaker 06

  How's it going, bro? Mining.

• 36:48Speaker 01

  He could be anywhere.

• 36:54Speaker 06

  LEEEEE! Slenderman Enderman!

• 37:01Speaker 01

  Okay, okay, we're good.

• 37:05Ryan Broderick?

  And PewDiePie plays Slender and gets millions of views. And both PewDiePie and Slenderman enter into the cultural lexicon. That's basically how it happens.

• 37:15Speaker 03

  Are you saying PewDiePie specifically to upset people?

• 37:19Speaker 01

  It's highly debated. He can't answer that as to whether or not he just can't say the name, doesn't know it, or if he's trolling our listeners.

• 37:27Ryan Broderick?

  That's right.

• 37:28Speaker 03

  Or trolling PewDiePie, because that guy also is not great, so.

• 37:33Speaker 01

  The mystery has to live on. Sorry.

• 37:36Ryan Broderick?

  So yeah.

• 37:37Speaker 03

  It is interesting hearing, yeah, just how like Slenderman really caught like every wave that was happening on the internet at the time. Like, it was just such a perfect trajectory for something like this.

• 37:47Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, yeah, I mean, and I think it's because it was so flexible. You get Slenderman in Halloween costumes. There are like teens react to Slenderman videos. You get parodies. Grant actually put in a montage for us. Here, check this out.

• 38:01Speaker 06

  Whoa, whoa, no, no, no, no, no, no.

• 38:20Speaker 07

  Poor his very best suit just to impress you. Have sympathy for poor Slenderman. Oh, no, no, no, no, no.

• 38:31Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, the one I'm looking at right now has 24 million views. It's called Teens React to Slenderman. And what's really interesting here is like 2012, in a lot of the research I've done over the years, is like the exact year the internet turns into the current internet we have. And based on what I can see, it's because 2012 is the year that mobile phone penetration beats desktop. Like YouTube is huge now. Like 2012 YouTube is probably like, I mean, there will be nothing like it ever again, probably.

• 39:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was just watching a video of like, who was the most popular on YouTube throughout the last like 15 years? And like 2012 was like the, the last little era where it was like indie creators? And then it becomes just like music video channels and vivos and like corporations? And now it's like a...

• 39:21Ryan Broderick?

  Creators that are corporations.

• 39:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, exactly. Yeah.

• 39:25Ryan Broderick?

  2012 is like gang of style. This is the moment YouTube culture like pops. And Slenderman is definitely part of that because I think it's a lot of creators looking for stuff to talk about. And like Slenderman is easy because you can just Google and like be like, okay, here's like, the internet is still kind of hidden knowledge in 2012.

• 39:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, and so it's like that curation element too, where like you have, we've like moved away from the analog internet, or I guess what felt like this like version of the internet that no longer exists. And so if you're just joining the internet as like a teenager, you don't have access to that. So you're looking at these creators who are like, this is the scariest video from something awful. This is the scary, like, let me show you the scariest content. And I feel like those pages just all exploded because they were just able to like curate those posts, basically.

• 40:12Ryan Broderick?

  I think that's exactly right. There's also one important last piece here, which we have not mentioned that I made a note of to bring up because I don't think it's an accident that in 2012, you have a very big culture on Tumblr that becomes obsessed with what they call the Tumblr sexy man. And many Tumblr sexy men, Loki, Doctor Who, the ones that are from the Lorax, what do they all have in common? They're skinny and they wear suits. And I think it is not an accident that like, a lot of people want to have sex with Slenderman because he looks like a Tumblr sexy man.

• 40:46Speaker 03

  Wow, Tumblr's sexiest man of the year, Slenderman 2012.

• 40:50Ryan Broderick?

  Slenderman. I don't think it's an accident that like, there was something for everyone with Slenderman. You could draw like sexy fan, I remember like, a lot of sexy Slenderman fan art where like, the image was cut off like, right at his shoulders. Like, he didn't fit in the image.

• 41:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, he's tall, ladies, he's tall.

• 41:06Ryan Broderick?

  He's tall. He's tall and he wears a suit. What more could you want?

• 41:09Speaker 03

  He's always dressed to impress guys. No, what's interesting, I remember using Tumblr a lot back in the day and specifically like, being, this is gonna sound bad, but like, being very morbidly curious about the girls that were obsessed with serial killers. Like, there was a lot of fan pages for Dylan and Eric and Columbine. And there was a lot of like, I can change him, baby girl edits of horrible, like Ted Bundy and mostly the Columbine guys, I guess, is the ones that I saw. But Slenderman in a way like, fits into that because he is like, pure evil. He still steals children. He kills children. He drives you crazy. But he's also like, I guess, I don't want to say conventionally attractive because I don't think

• 41:52Speaker 03

  he has a face, but he, like, he's tall. And so, he just like, also becomes part of those same girls Tumblr feeds.

• 42:01Ryan Broderick?

  In 2012, I did a story about the fandom around the Aurora shooter, James Holmes. And they called themselves the Holmesies.

• 42:10Speaker 03

  Oh, my god.

• 42:10Ryan Broderick?

  And when I wrote about them, they got mad at me. And so, they photoshopped my head onto gay pornography and made a bunch of images of me being fucked by James Holmes.

• 42:21Speaker 03

  Were you like, a little bit proud that you made them so mad?

• 42:25Ryan Broderick?

  No, it was like annoying. It was like more annoying than I thought. Like it was like, I, I, I never sort of love when the internet does that because it just means I'm gonna lose my weekend, right? Like, uh, but like when you shake the hornet's nest, stuff comes out. Um, so yeah, they, they didn't like the attention. Cause I think Tumblr cracked down on them after I wrote about it.

• 42:43Speaker 03

  Was there sentiment around him specifically? I am just curious.

• 42:48Ryan Broderick?

  It was that photo of him with the, with the red hair that got misreported as being Joker hair. Which it like seemed to have no connection, but it, because he shot up a, a screening of Batman and he had dyed red hair. People kind of assumed he was dressed like the Joker, but he wasn't.

• 43:03Speaker 01

  Joker has green hair.

• 43:06Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, uh, I agree.

• 43:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, didn't he, he picked that theater because it was gonna be full. It wasn't because of Batman at all. Yeah.

• 43:13Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly. But because he had dyed his hair, the, a lot of local media like, uh, uh, immediately reported that he was dressed like the Joker. And he's like a white guy and like women love when white guys kill people. Like they, they, that's just like a thing.

• 43:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, we love it.

• 43:25Ryan Broderick?

  Tumblr girls love that. Like it, you can fix him.

• 43:27Speaker 03

  It is. I mean, look at Luigi Mangione. Again, I don't know if you want to include that, but like.

• 43:31Ryan Broderick?

  Let's not, let's not include him there. Cause I'm talking about bad guys. I'm talking about people who do bad stuff.

• 43:37Speaker 03

  I plead the fifth. I can't say anything. I, yeah.

• 43:41Ryan Broderick?

  The amount of menswear subreddits that just like constantly share photos of him in loafers at his hearing. They're like obsessed with Luigi Mangione's feet in a way that I think is like, they're all like, where can I buy these shoes? And it's like, you don't want to buy the shoes. You just want to share the photo of his feet.

• 43:55Speaker 03

  Is it the feet? I think, I feel like that photo is so perfectly staged. Like I think every element of that photo, they knew exactly what they were doing. Like the perfect loafers, the way that his ankles are crossed. Those little handcuffs on the, I think it is, I think they knew what they were doing.

• 44:13Speaker 01

  This is the first time I'm glad we're a video podcast because you should look at, at Kalen's face describing this. And like a dreamy air bubble kind of pops up.

• 44:24Ryan Broderick?

  I have Getty Access. We can buy the photo. But that is all, not to brag, but I have Getty Access. So I can buy a giant print of Louis J. Manjele's feet. So this is all kind of, I think, good foundational work for where we're headed next, which is kind of a darker road. Because the internet, like I said, kind of with the James Holmes fans, like, no one's in charge. Like, no one can really tell you, like, how to process these things, how to share about, how to share these things, how to, like, think about them. And fandoms curdle. They turn toxic. People take them in weird directions. And in 2014 is when we get to the Slenderman stabbing, which was often misremembered as a Slenderman murder.

• 45:10Ryan Broderick?

  The two 12-year-old girls in Wisconsin who stabbed their classmate did it inspired by Slenderman. Their classmate luckily survived with injuries. This is a summary of it from a news report at the time. "The 12-year-old girls have been plotting the murder for months, police say. Morgan E. Gaser was allowed to have two friends over each year for her birthday. This year, she'd..."

• 45:36Speaker 00

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• 46:31Ryan Broderick?

  celebrate on May 30th. That is the day she and Anisa E. Ware would try to kill their friend during a sleepover. Ware said that Gacer told her they should become proxies of Slenderman and kill their friend to prove themselves worthy of him. Ware said she was surprised by Gacer's suggestion, but also excited to prove skeptics wrong and show that Slenderman really did exist. Do you remember when this happened?

• 46:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, yeah, I followed this story really closely when it happened. And it's, I guess it became part of the lore, like the proxies that they're referring, like at this point in the lore, Slenderman lived in a house in the woods and had people that would do his bidding. So that was like the proxy they were referring to becoming. You could be like an indentured servant and pledge your loyalty to Slenderman. Yeah.

• 47:19Ryan Broderick?

  We're going to talk about how this changed the story of Slenderman, how the world reacted to it, and, and how I think this changed the way the media thought about the importance of the internet, all after the break. But first, a word from our sponsors.

• 47:36Speaker 03

  Little handcuffs for dainty boy ankles.

• 47:40Ryan Broderick?

  Little, little, yeah, Luigi Mangione's loafers.

• 47:42Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 47:47Ryan Broderick?

  What do you remember from like after the stabbing? Like, how do you remember the media reacting to this?

• 47:53Speaker 03

  The media immediately kind of glommed on to this being like part of a bigger societal issue of things that were happening. This is also the time where teens started having cell phones. And so there, it was like just ripe for a story like this to come up and strike fear in every parent's heart. So I do remember it being immediately like a parable about leaving kids alone with their phones, like letting teenagers have access to the internet. There was a lot going on with this story and a lot going on with those girls that was not shared at first. It just seemed like this was something that could happen to any kid at any school across the country.

• 48:32Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, my main sort of memory of this period was that it was a lot of media outlets not really sort of understanding what Slenderman is or was, not really caring, but knowing that like the internet and social media was popular and they could just like sort of attach stuff to it. So it was a lot, like I remember having to like write multiple explainers at the time being like, this is Slenderman, this is where it comes from, like it is just a meme, basically, like it's not, it's not like toxic or evil, it's just like this thing that like people have been sharing for years now.

• 49:09Speaker 03

  Like saying that it started from a Photoshop contest almost makes it scarier because it's this thing that started on the internet and you don't know where it started from, but your kids are taking it so seriously because they're too young to understand and now they're killing their friends over it.

• 49:22Ryan Broderick?

  This is also peak like local Facebook era. So you're getting a lot of local towns that are now on Facebook for the first time, sharing local news.

• 49:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:30Ryan Broderick?

  That local news becomes national news and then like the tabloids attack it and it goes like, you know, huge.

• 49:36Speaker 03

  And one of the first things coming from the police was that the girls were not remorseful. I do remember that. So that added.

• 49:42Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 49:43Speaker 03

  And that, so that got like spread around really fast because these girls were minors. So like their names are not being shared, other things about them are not being shared. But I do remember the police immediately being like, yeah, they didn't feel bad about this.

• 49:52Ryan Broderick?

  Right. And remember what we said, Panic World listeners, you can't trust the police in any kind of statement they give. That's why we think that fentanyl can be absorbed through your skin.

• 50:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:03Ryan Broderick?

  A bunch of, I guess like the bigger players, you could say, in the Slenderman lore universe have to put out statements. They say, you know, this was a fake thing that, you know, went horrible, but this does nothing to stop this turning into a very real moral panic. And stories pop up about copycats, starting basically around like late 2014. A mother in Ohio says that her daughter attacking her with a knife could have been the result of Slenderman. According to this local news story, she had her hood up and had her hands covered with her sleeves and the mask, the mother said. She said her 13 year old daughter was obsessed with the fictional character Slenderman. She was someone else during that attack, the mother said. We found things that she had written and made reference

• 50:47Ryan Broderick?

  to Slenderman. She even created a world for Slenderman in the game Minecraft. Then you have like another story out of Florida where a 14 year old girl was arrested after trying to set her family's house on fire. And she had visited websites that had Slenderman on them.

• 51:04Speaker 03

  Which I mean, if you're gonna go through any 14 year olds browser at the time, they're gonna have something Slenderman on it, but it's just an easy thing to point to.

• 51:12Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I mean, it's a lot of, it's a lot of parents who are looking for a reason why, you know, their kid would do something horrible. And then a lot of local media outlets that are happy to include Slenderman in the headline because they need traffic. It's all leading to like a classic American moral panic. And of course, it gets topped off by Law and Order SVU doing a Slenderman.

• 51:32Speaker 03

  Oh, my God, they did a whole episode on it. That's right. They always, yeah, they always have to be there.

• 51:37Speaker 08

  They were screaming, "Run, Zoe, run!" But he caught me and knocked me down. You saw him? Zoe, you saw his face?

• 51:51Speaker 08

  Yes. It was the Glasgow man.

• 51:56Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. And then finally, weeks later, in classic New York Times fashion, you get "Struggling to Understand Slenderman" in June 2014. And it's a roundup of the whole thing.

• 52:09Ryan Broderick?

  The Chicago Tribune writes about it, writing, "They describe the internet as a culture where dark magic is celebrated, but religion is considered bothersome. We reap what we sow."

• 52:19Speaker 03

  They're still saying that, though.

• 52:21Ryan Broderick?

  And they aren't the only ones. Yeah, CNN is warning parents about the dangers of Slenderman. Like, we are now full craziness in 2014, by the end of 2014.

• 52:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is a real threat that's living in your kids' phones. He is just waiting there to take over their minds. You're perfectly normal, nothing else wrong with them, children, and like, get them to commit murder against you or their friends. Which was not the case at all. Like, at that point, it's probably, again, because these girls are minors, they're, it's probably not being reported. The psychological issues that they were having at the time, the mental health component to the stabbing, like, none of that is being

• 52:58Ryan Broderick?

  Plus, what if their friend just had bad vibes?

• 53:01Speaker 03

  Well, they really thought that she did because they were both like cognitively impaired in different ways. But like, yeah, it just, none of that is being shared.

• 53:11Ryan Broderick?

  We talked about this a lot in our episode about like the blue whale game in Russia where it's like, there's a bunch of mental health issues happening with kids. They have hobbies and interests like everyone else. Something bad happens and it's left to the parents to sort of like, figure out how this horrible thing happened. And so they're just like, oh, well, they're looking at this like creepy guy on the internet. So that's probably what did it. You know, it's a very desperate.

• 53:38Speaker 03

  Both of the girls involved, their parents were not aware of like the extent of, um, one of the girls had schizophrenia. The parents did not know that. They knew that her father, her biological father had schizophrenia and they never went and had her checked. And she had been suffering since she was very little. She'd been having delusions. Turns out like all of the imaginary friends that never went away, like that was the schizophrenia that was going untreated. And then the other girl had, I remember reading, she had a learning disability that was so severe when she went to the hospital after the attack, they actually had to check her for a TBI because they thought that maybe she had hit her head that hard. So these are the girls that really took to the Slenderman. It's not the average child in America that

• 54:22Speaker 03

  was like having these delusions, right? It was one girl with very bad schizophrenia who was able to convince her other friends that had this like severe learning disability, that if they committed this murder, they could be proxies for Slenderman.

• 54:35Ryan Broderick?

  Right. Exactly. And, and that's always the way, that's always the case.

• 54:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:40Ryan Broderick?

  The kind of kid that's spending all day online, looking at this stuff without like any sort of parental supervision anyways, like who are just like off in their own, like they're, they're, they're being neglected in other ways. Like it's all part of sort of a, a larger issue, right?

• 54:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. I remember at the time being like, oh, it's so shocking that it was two young girls that did this. And at the same time being like, of course it was two young girls that did this because the ability to convince your friends to do something insane.

• 55:10Speaker 03

  Is I think canon in a lot of like little girls' lives. Maybe, I don't know, we'll see what the listeners have to say about that. But you see, like, did you see the article that just came out about those little girls in Arizona that all plotted to murder one of the boys in their class? And they were going to stage it to look like a suicide and they were in fifth grade.

• 55:30Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, did little boy, was he, was he an asshole? Did he deserve it?

• 55:34Speaker 03

  I don't think so. Actually, this is gonna sound crazy. I think the girls were the assholes in the situation.

• 55:40Ryan Broderick?

  Well, that's surprising. I, I'll have to read more about that. That doesn't sound right to me, but.

• 55:45Speaker 03

  You're gonna have to do your own research, of course.

• 55:46Ryan Broderick?

  I'll have to do my own research on that one. No, but yeah, I think, I think there's always, whenever you get like all America whipped up into a crazy frenzy. If you dig deep enough, there's always a gender component and there's always some sort of like attempt at hiding parental negligence. Like those are like, it's classic, like Salem witch trial bullshit. Like, and we've just been doing it for hundreds of years. And Slenderman is sort of a, a, the new, one of the newer versions of it. But it's also kind of the moment where the mainstream media, the mainstream society starts to realize that like this internet thing is a big deal. Like, it's not going away. Like memes are, they matter, basically.

• 56:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, that when your kid goes on their computer at night to do their homework, they actually have access to this whole other world and that they're like participating in it, which I think a lot, like my parents didn't realize that when I was growing up. They didn't know the stuff that I was doing on the internet. They thought I was just like typing up homework assignments and then like closing my laptop.

• 56:42Ryan Broderick?

  No, I don't, I think you're exactly right. Luckily, we have solved this problem for good, at least when it comes to Slenderman. The, the end of the Slenderman story arrives about four years later with the release of the movie Slenderman, which has an 8% on Rotten Tomatoes. I did not watch it. Have you seen it?

• 56:58Speaker 03

  No, 8%.

• 57:00Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I, 8%. The consensus is Slenderman might be thin, but he's positive, positively robust compared to the flimsy assortment of scares generated by the would be chiller that bears his name.

• 57:14Speaker 01

  The only thing that can kill a meme is a bad IP.

• 57:18Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it seems like it didn't really go anywhere. I also think we are. Talking about this at an interesting moment because the world that invented Slenderman, the sort of early social media world is clearly going away and being replaced with something else. Largely probably because of AI. And I do think we are due for like a spooky AI thing. I've seen beginnings of it, but I haven't seen something as big as Slenderman, but I think it's, I think we're due.

• 57:48Speaker 03

  I worry about this not to be one of the parents that we were kind of just laughing at, but my worry is like, okay, in the Slenderman case, you have millions of kids that interact with Slenderman content and like nothing bad happens. And you have one girl who has schizophrenia and has these delusions that Slenderman is real. It is like so one in a million. But now with AI, Slenderman can talk back to you? Like you can make a Slenderman chatbot that like really interacts with you. And I think you already see people kind of losing touch with reality with chatbots. People who otherwise I don't think would. So my fear is like a 13 year old kid who doesn't really know what's real and what's fake anyways is like, I don't know, maybe gonna start interacting with

• 58:33Speaker 03

  these like scary chatbots. I feel like that would be the next iteration in my mind.

• 58:39Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, we are, we're already hearing stories of people being involuntarily committed for ChatGPT psychosis. Like it is happening.

• 58:45Speaker 03

  Oh, really? I haven't heard that. Yeah, that's horrifying.

• 58:48Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, there's, there's been about a dozen cases, like high profile cases of people being convinced by the AI that, um, you know, they should do certain things or hurt themselves to, to please the AI. So like this, this is definitely happening, but we, I haven't seen like the creation of a character or the creation of like a, of a, of an urban legend yet, you know, which I think.

• 59:12Speaker 03

  There was a little bit of that at the beginning. I want to say like two years ago, when like the image generation component was like really shitty. It was like, if you typed one thing in, it would always kind of come up with the same shitty scary image.

• 59:24Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, yeah.

• 59:26Speaker 03

  That was a little bit of like, oh, AI keeps making this one cryptid. It was like a, they were calling it like AI cryptid. That's kind of since gone away though. And there hasn't been anything that's like filled that space.

• 59:39Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, you're right. But it's interesting that we've already kind of hit something close. Like, we're, yeah, we're clearly due for something else.

• 59:45Speaker 01

  Just on that point, though, that like, the whole thing with these is that like, you're being guess-anded to creep yourself out with other people. And as Ryan, as you've talked about a lot, like, if you're talking to a chatbot, it's like you alone with a robot. Can it like break contain if it's not being built upon by other people? Like, is it gonna affect like creepypasta on the whole? If people are just creeping themselves out and with like their own little Slenderman bot?

• 1:00:14Ryan Broderick?

  I think like people just naturally share scary stories. I am not such a doomer that I think that like AI is the end of like, socialization and stuff. I think we just do it. I I'm waiting for someone to figure out like, what Helen was saying, like a, an exploit that you can just, all of us can do, closer to like, like the Studio Ghibli stuff. Like you figure out like, oh, wow, like the AI is really good at, uh, Studio Ghibli. Like, you will figure out like the AI is good at this weird kind of horror thing that like young people are drawn to. Like, I I'm just sort of waiting for that moment.

• 1:00:46Speaker 03

  We are in like a creepypasta drought right now. I think break room or backrooms is really the only thing to break through in the last five or so years. Um, I was telling Grant about it, but it's, after like Slenderman ended, right? We had like the creepy pasta, the no sleep subreddit and like that was

• 1:01:05Ryan Broderick?

  Sure.

• 1:01:05Speaker 03

  just like fully written stories and a lot of those became books and a lot of those books are very good and a lot of the creepypastas are still some of my favorite ones. Uh, but then that subreddit like made a bunch of really weird rules about what you can write and what you can say and like what kinds of characters you can use. And so it just completely shut down and there's like no good. I mean, I don't think there's much good content being like posted on there now. So I do think people are like craving that like community horror that gets passed around. Cause it's always been there, like since the dawn of the internet, it's been there. So like, they will come up with something via, like, using AI. I just don't know what it would be.

• 1:01:44Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, if we, because I want to cash in. That's what, that's what this whole episode's actually been about.

• 1:01:49Speaker 03

  This is a business opportunity.

• 1:01:51Ryan Broderick?

  I want to make the, the next Labubu.

• 1:01:54Speaker 03

  Don't we all? We would just be able to retire if we made Labubu.

• 1:01:57Ryan Broderick?

  I want that Labubu money. There's something clearly coming because we are in a drought. Or like, we are both wrong and there's just like a completely new way of interacting online, coming over the hill, but I, I don't think so. I think we've kind of always been doing this. Like, we, we, we were drawn to campfire stories. Even if they involve like a really tall, sexy man that steals your children.

• 1:02:16Speaker 01

  So what, the problem that occurs is that it crosses, things like Slenderman cross over enough that, that the teenagers who did the stabbing didn't know its origin. It starts one place and then it ends up in a different part of the internet where, where like they're not tracing it. Is the internet today primed for that problem to be better or worse than when Slenderman took off?

• 1:02:42Ryan Broderick?

  It's, it's an inherent issue with the way that we built the internet, like, the modern internet, because most social platforms launched as social networks where you would share your life. They have over time morphed into content platforms. And like, even the earliest years of YouTube, there were people putting like fiction up there. They were putting like skits or sketches or whatever. But there's not an, like, like, if you think about TV or you think about movies, there's like an agreed upon visual language of this is fake or this is real. Like, if it has actors, then you kind of assume like, okay, like this, I'm not watching something happen in real life. The internet though scrambles all that because the platforms that we use

• 1:03:27Ryan Broderick?

  don't want to be defined as like this, like, other than like, let's say, deviant art or like, you know, maybe like a, a no sleep subreddit or like specific places you make to share fiction or art. Everyone else is just putting whatever they can, wherever they can to get eyeballs. So you end up with this like constant, constant problem of like, is the thing I'm looking at real? Is it fake? Is it fake but meant to look real? Does it look real, but it's being filmed like it's fake because you want it to be cinematic? Like, there's no agreed upon visual language of, is the thing I'm looking at on the internet art or not? And that is a problem that we have not fixed. There's no, there seems to be no even desire to fix it.

• 1:04:10Ryan Broderick?

  Because like, half of attention online is generated by being like, is that real? You know, like, and it's been like that for 20 years now. Slenderman literally is one of the first big examples of, is that real? You know, like, and that's how the entire attention economy functions now. And I don't see anyone stepping up to sort of say like, alright, if you're gonna make something fictitious on the internet, you've gotta put credits and you gotta be part of the union and you gotta like do all the things that like movies do to like, let you know that you're watching something fictitious. We don't have that online. It's a free for all.

• 1:04:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's just gonna get worse with AI too. Like, some of the videos, I saw this morning even, a video of, there was like a five-year-old girl that fell off a Disney cruise, and her dad saved her, she's fine. But even when I was watching like the video of the rescue, I had to like, ask myself like, is this AI? Which I find myself asking more and more. So like, the "is this real" is now applying to like, news and health advice. And so much more than just seeing a picture of a Lovecraftian demon in the woods, which... Yeah, so it's just, it's a very strange time. I don't know, I find myself, like, I often wonder if we're gonna get to a place where, when we open our phones,

• 1:05:28Speaker 03

  like, when I have kids, or like, the next generation of like, kids that are raised, like, are they gonna open their phones and be like, this is the fake place? Like, I'm just gonna go into this like, world where everything's fiction and accept that? Or, because I feel like we're splitting the difference in a weird way today. We're like, half the stuff we see isn't real, or it's just like misinformation, or... It's fixed. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. It's it's very strange. It's hard to navigate.

• 1:05:52Ryan Broderick?

  Great. Total hopelessness.

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  That's the kind of note I like to end an episode on. That, yeah, there it was.

• 1:05:58Ryan Broderick?

  Thank you for coming on the show. This was a delightful conversation about my favorite creepy tall man. So yeah, thank you again. This was really, this was really fun.

• 1:06:06Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for having me. I always love talking about creepypastas and the internet and Slender Man. It's been a blast.

• 1:06:14Ryan Broderick?

  If people want to follow you online, where can they do that?

• 1:06:16Speaker 03

  I'm a heart starts pounding wherever you get your podcasts and also TikTok, Instagram, all socials. Yeah, check us out. We post a lot about urban legends, a lot of folklore, some creepypasta stuff. So I think anyone who likes this episode will find something they like on the heart starts pounding feed.

• 1:06:37Ryan Broderick?

  Panic World is a production of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick.

• 1:06:43Speaker 00

  Life is all about making decisions. Sometimes you make questionable ones, like buying a new TV that's too big for the wall because the electronics store employee was a little too good at their job. Then sometimes you make great ones, like protecting your home and auto with Progressive. You get customized coverage options so you can be sure you have the right coverage. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers not available in all states.

• 1:07:13Ryan Broderick?

  Josh Fielstedt is our production coordinator and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. From Courier is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes, along with our producer, Kevin Maroney, and National Managing Director and Executive Producer, Kevin Dreyfus. R.C. Demezzo is their VP of Brand and Social. Charlotte Robinson is their Deputy Director of Brand and Social. Mary Ann Couga is their Director of Marketing, and Tracy Kaplan is the Senior Vice President of Sales and Distribution. If you want to sponsor the show or give us products to sell, she's the one to talk to. You can email her at [email protected]. Lastly, here's my advice for you. Chill out and touch grass while you still can.