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Beware the Slenderman, dir. by Irene Taylor Brodsky (HBO/Warner Bros., 2016)
Sleek, polished, and undeniably emulating the recent trend in gripping, Netflix-style truecrime documentaries, Irene Taylor Brodsky's Beware the Slenderman (2016) begins in a tone similar to its predecessors. Ominous dark music pulses in time with dislocated images of a child jumping in the air, leaves falling, sunbeams penetrating woodland canopies, and snippets of computer screens. As the title music changes to softer, more melancholic piano, drone footage of blue skies and the sound of police sirens provide the backdrop to a dispatch call via an officer who has information received from a distressed passer-by: 'He came upon a 12 year-old female. She appears to have been stabbed.' 'She appears to be what?' asks the dispatcher. 'Stabbed', the officer states. 'Stabbed?' 'Correct', confirms the officer.
On 31 May 2014, twelve year-old Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier, having spent the previous night together at a sleepover with their friend Payton (Bella) Leutner (also twelve) stabbed Leutner nineteen times and left her for dead in a wooded area in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Reports surrounding the case claimed that the two girls had plotted to kill for over a year, intending to deliver the victim as a form of sacrifice to the online fictional character known as the 'Slenderman'. Though seriously injured, Leutner survived the stabbing. After being reprimanded in a juvenile detention centre and psychiatrically assessed for over a year, the girls (now fifteen) will, it has recently been announced, be tried as adults. While the manner in which these teens will be tried has caused a degree of debate concerning juvenile culpability, arguably what has dominated this case from the start is the alleged correlation between the girls' actions and an internet meme. So intertwined and sensationalised have the attempted murder and the fictional character become that the majority of media reports have dubbed that case 'The Slenderman Stabbing'. And unfortunately, symptomatic of this sensationalism is Beware the Slenderman. Aired earlier this year, HBO's documentary conceals its own brand of sensationalism behind an exploration of the genuine grief of two sets of parents, whose lives have been irrevocably torn apart by the actions of their daughters on that day in Waukesha. The documentary is ostensibly ambivalent, but...