Slender Man’s Face: the Religious Foundation of an Online Mythology

The Slender Man, an internet-born monster from 2009, owes its lasting popularity to how its online community resolved two challenges of mass communal storytelling: narrative inconsistency, addressed through apophatic theology (defining the monster by what it is not), and the erosion of fear when stories are easily searchable online, countered by the concept of the Tulpa (a thought-form made real). Participants play with knowledge and religious ideas, generating mimetic excess that blurs the boundary between reality and fiction.

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Abstract

In 2009, the internet gave birth to a monster. The Slender Man, like many other forms of online storytelling, is a product of mass communal storytelling. What has led to the Slender Man’s unique long-lasting position online is in part due to the way the community initially dealt with the issues which arose in mass communal storytelling. These issues are primarily found in two modes: 1) the inconsistency of the narrative, which is typically related to the creative freedom given to every member of a community, which was solved using apophatic theology; and 2) the reality of the scare, which begins to lose traction when the narrative is online and thus easily searchable, solved through the notion of the Tulpa. Participants play with knowledge and religious conceptions, through which mimetic excess occurs (Taussig, 1993), leading to a crossing of boundaries between reality and fiction.