Directed by Irene Taylor Brodsky. 2016
The final shot of Beware the Slenderman is haunting. It shows us a construction site in progress, two roads intersecting, a patch of cleared woods. It's as banal as images get. But it's the unseen--as in all great horror--that's truly terrifying. In this case, it's the erasure of a bloody deed, the active sanitizing of a terrible blight. Quite literally paving over it. The image taps our deepest well of fear, where all the bad things get tossed, deep and dark. From Edgar Allan Poe to David Lynch to Stephen King, this has been the great theme and subject of horror: walling up or burying the bad. Forcing forgetting.
It's particularly haunting here, in the context of this story, where the space between the real physical world and the twilight universe of the unreal is so razor thin--and is, in fact, key. The filmmakers often reflect on the emotional toll taken on the parents of the child-murdering kids at the center of this story, but always on the edges are the iPads, the cameras, the Internet, the manipulation of reality through lenses and screens and technology and, most importantly, imagination. There's some key balance in all of these things that lets a mother read It and understand it's fiction, a balance missing from her daughter and her daughter's friend. Missing from their emotional lives, their psychologies. And its absence opens a kind of tear in that thin, crucial space, giving birth from a fictional, near-Lovecraftian universe to true and incomprehensible horror. A tear we're all too eager to patch with concrete and call the past.
