[wpdevart_youtube]ySy8mcceTno[/wpdevart_youtube]SLENDERMAN **
Dir: Sylvain White (15, 95 mins)
Slenderman is an urban myth dating back to 2009 when artist Eric Knudsen created an image on online forum Something Awful showing a tall, thin, faceless man behind several children. Designed to unsettle, these images and several copycat versions exploded over the internet, eventually gaining a huge mythology and leading to two 12-year-old girls stabbing an 11-year-old in Wisconsin as an offering to this mythical creature. Taking such a controversial figure and turning it into a mainstream horror film is somewhat uncomfortable, given that real life has offered something more disturbing, as documented by the HBO documentary Beware The Slenderman. Now, rather belatedly, comes the fictional scarefest which has four high school girls trying to debunk the accumulated lore of the Slenderman, until one of them goes missing. What follows is a series of unpleasant images, kids hurting themselves and some obvious horror tropes. See if you must, but Hereditary is a better horror that doesn’t seem so grimly exploitative. Opens Aug 24