In this case, though, when you glimpse the character of Slender Man (Javier Botet) in the background of photographs or amateur videos, or even when you see him up close, he remains an oblique phantom: tall and spindly, like Ichabod Crane, in a black suit and parson’s tie, with long arms like tree branches and a blank blob of a face. “Slender Man” takes off from a “creepypasta” Internet meme that originated in 2009, and it’s the character’s abstract quality that results in a handful of shivery moments, especially when the four high-school girls who are the film’s main characters call up underground video files in which he lurks like an outlaw with a smudged face. But “Slender Man” is the kind of movie in which images come before logic, because there really isn’t much logic.
– The reviews are in for Slender Man, the faceless character's jump from the Internet to the big screen thanks to Sony Pictures and director Sylvain White, and they're nearly universally awful. Four zingers summing up critics' 11% rating on Rotten Tomatoes: "Perhaps that's one way to kill off Slender Man: make his story so dull that no one cares," writes Adam Graham at Detroit News. Bill Goodykoontz at the Arizona Republic notes "Slender Man bravely goes against the well-established notion that scary movies should be scary." "Slender Man is a fundamentally derivative and empty-headed horror film," is how Owen Gleiberman puts it at Variety. Glenn Kenny at the New York Times calls it "the most perfunctory horror picture I've seen in some time. It's not even worth making a 'thin gruel' joke about."