Killing for Slender Man

SOMEONE Canada and the Cruel and Unusual Project present Killing for Slender Man, a FREE interactive panel session and seminar with Lee Mellor and Vivek Venkatesh. Moderated by Amy Swiffen.

Based on research conducted by Lee Mellor, Vivek Venkatesh, Jason Wallin and Tieja Thomas.

This seminar looks at the rise of the mythical Slender Man, a malevolent twenty-first century entity believed to exist only on the Internet. This includes a critical overview of its credited role in an attempted murder by stabbing committed on May 31, 2014 by two twelve-year-old girls who claimed the crime marked an attempt to gain the favour of this same entity. Assuming a representational approach to the analysis of monsters and monstrosity, it is conventionally speculated that Slender Man functions as a microcosm of social anxiety, fear, and uncertainty while straddling digital and analog spaces.

First, we will attend to the specific origins of Slender Man with emphasis on its singularity as a monster of the twenty-first century. Second, we will utilize both a representational and ontological approach to examining the Slender Man mythos to speculate on its function as both an index of trans- gression and vehicle for grappling with the contemporary social order and the challenges it advances for understanding identity, subjectivity, and belief. Third, having examined a series of disparate online accounts comparable to gospels, including fake documentary footage, stories, memes, and computer games, we argue that the genesis and nature of the Slender Man mythos closely mirrors those of antiquity, including paganism, polytheism, and other so-called “new” religions.

Leave your expectations at the door.

This lecture is a part of Cruel and Unusual: Studies in Legal Violence, organized by the Centre for Insterdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture.