“Beware the Slenderman,” a true crime documentarydirected by Irene Taylor Brodsky, is a chilling film. And it's not because of Slenderman.
Though that tall, faceless figure in a suit and tie looms over the premise as in so many DeviantArt comics and amateur YouTube creepypasta videos, he plays a small role in a film that’s more interested in asking how the internet, isolation and mental illness led to the stabbing of 12-year-old Payton Leutner a little more than two years ago by Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier, her two best friends.
A lesser, more sensational documentary would have probably put forth the following ideas — Kids are gullible, especially when given unlimited access to the internet; predators use the web to coerce vulnerable children into harming themselves and each other; and the Internet is bad for young, developing minds.
The truth of the story is more upsetting. We learn that Geyser, from a young age, had trouble experiencing compassion. Her mother mentions her daughter did not cry when Bambi’s mother died and she’d always wondered about her daughter’s capacity for empathy.
We learn later Geyser’s father lives with schizophrenia, though neither he nor Geyser’s mother ever told their daughter because they were worried they’d shock her.
According to her father, Weier became reclusive after receiving an iPad for Christmas and would often the spend hours after school gazing at the device. In one sequence Brodsky shows us snippets from Weier’s YouTube history. We see a cat eating a mouse and a CGI-rendered clown cackling at dead baby jokes. We see a couple of videos that tout themselves as “psychopath quizzes,” and Weier’s comments show delight in her ability to score highly on them. Of course, we see Slenderman videos.
In an interview with a child psychologist, the point is raised that, had Geyser and Weier had more friends, Leutner probably wouldn’t have been stabbed and had there been more opportunity for disruption, the girls probably wouldn’t have fed off of each other’s fantasies in the same vicious cycle.
In their mutual and unchallenged obsession with Slenderman, Geyser and Weier never limited their increasingly extreme fantasies. Fueled by fervent internet communities across virtually every platform on the web, the girls became trapped in their own delusion, and that entanglement, alongside untreated mental illness, is why Weier created so many murder plots she couldn’t keep them straight and why the girls stabbed Leutner 19 times with a knife in an effort to appease a digital boogeyman.
Brodsky makes it clear from the start that Geyser and Weier are outsiders. They have few friends aside from each other and Leutner and are picked on by the rest of their sixth-grade class.
If I were to play pop psychologist here — and I want to, because this is my column, but I also don’t want to, because the movie never does — I would say this: Outsiders have always sought hobbies into which they can retreat when life gets difficult. As a teenager, life gets difficult for everyone, and the internet only makes escaping easier. With their imagination sparked by a found-footage phenomenon, Geyser and Weier created a fantasy and, from what Brodsky's documentary leads the viewer to believe, never once questioned it.
The crime committed is horrendous and obviously lacks a single cause. While it’s one driven by Internet culture, it’s also one that raises necessary questions regarding the cruelty of childhood bullying and societal prejudice toward people with mental illness. “Beware the Slenderman” is not an easy film to watch, but thankfully it doesn’t fall back on tired scare-mongering and moral panic-rousing. Instead, Brodsky shows us a crime where the motives are every bit as disturbing and ambiguous as the suited apparition Geyser and Weier strove to appease.
“Beware the Slenderman” is streaming now on HBO NOW.
