Turns out we didn’t leave Slender Man, the surprisingly popular fictional horror character invented on the Something Awful forums, back in 2014 where he belongs. The second trailer for the official Sony Slender Man movie, which will hit theaters Aug. 10, has dropped.
The trailer reveals the movie’s backstory, which revolves around four high school girls stumbling across and becoming increasingly obsessed with the legend of Slender Man. One goes missing, the rest are determined to find out why, and their search leads them right to Slender Man. The movie comes from the mind of The Losers director Sylvain White and stars Javier Botet as the titular character. Horror fans will can rest assured that Botet's creepiness factor was more than certified by his role as the leper in It.
The entire thing might seem like typical internet lore, just wild enough to get the imagination going but too fantastical for anyone to truly believe in. However, there’s at least one case that proves just how terrifying the Slender Man’s influence really is. In 2014, two 12-year-old Wisconsin girls repeatedly stabbed a classmate in the woods in an attempt to prove the Slender Man was real. The two young girls believed this was how they had to appease the Slender Man or he would kill their families. Their stories were expounded on in the HBO documentary Beware the Slenderman.
The father of one of the girls who attacked their classmate, Bill Weier, strongly disapproves of the upcoming movie and spoke out against it earlier this year, soon after the first trailer was released. He called the film in “extreme poor taste” and called for theaters to refrain from showing it.
"It's absurd they want to make a movie like this," Weier said, according to ComicBook.com. "It's popularizing a tragedy is what it's doing. I'm not surprised but in my opinion it's extremely distasteful. All we're doing is extending the pain all three of these families have gone through."
Slender Man was originally slated to hit theaters in May, but was moved back to Aug. 10.
