YMMV / Slender Man

• Awesome Art: The teaser poster for the film has been positively received due to its simplistic nature (particularly the breaks in condensation on the windows subtly alluding to his Combat Tentacles).
• Awesome Music: The soundtrack by Ramin Djawadi and Brandon Campbell has been frequently cited as, far and away, the best thing in the film, with "Surrender" being a particular standout.
• Critic-Proof: A mild case. The film was panned by critics and audiences alike, but it managed to make $30.2 million domestically and $48.9 million worldwide against a $10 million budget.
• Designated Hero:
  • Hallie is painfully aloof towards her sister, to the point of refusing to let her hang out with her and her friends despite the fact that it's been made apparent that she had promised to let her do so multiple times, and in the end when she offers to let Slender Man take her for the sake of her sister, she runs screaming when the titular villain obliges her.
  • Then there's Wren. While there isn't much to be said about her, she tries to sacrifice Lizzy to Slender Man to save her own neck and she's only called out on it once, and that was briefly.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Around 2010, LittleKuriboh released "Concrete Giraffes", which ended with a Slender Man movie being produced (along with Joey proclaiming that Hollywood had officially ran out of ideas). Eight years later, and Sony releases an actual Slender Man movie, with many people taking its existence as a sign that Hollywood had officially ran out of ideas. Naturally, LittleKuriboh took the opportunity to have Marik and Bakura comment on this.
• Moe: Despite the fact that the movie was rather lackluster, Lizzy remained endearing throughout half of the film due to her rather cheerful disposition. Despite this, however, her Break the Cutie moment isn't too emotionally impactful and played rather unrealistically.
• Narm:
  • Wren frantically explaining Slender Man as being analogous to a computer virus in a human brain.
  • Lizzy going insane over the fact that Slender Man had no face, as it's highly unlikely anyone would go mad from that. Likewise, Wren suddenly finding herself caught up in a hallucination where she has no face, and stumbling around comically.
  • During the date scene between Hallie and Tom. We are treated to a rather uncomfortable scene of them making out, only for Hallie to suddenly hallucinate Tom having an exaggerated angry face while his head spazzes out. This is never elaborated on or brought up again.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: Slender Man had largely fallen out of favor in the years prior to 2018, not least because of the Slender Man stabbing from 2014. This unsurprisingly painted a target on the film, especially due to one of the trailers featuring scenes roughly similar to said incident, causing many to label it as being in poor taste; theaters in the area where it happened refused to show the film to respect the families of who it happened to. Said scenes actually appear to have been removed from the final cut, leading to speculation of Sony attempting damage control. This has a side effect of making the plot incomprehensible at times, with major characters suddenly disappearing without any explanation.
• Tainted by the Preview: The film's trailer has received a mixed reaction, due to its premise, and also the fact that it looks like a generic horror movie. However, some people were optimistic about the final product turning out to be good, but this turned out to be false.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Putting aside the criticism that the film was released long after Slender Man hype died away, a movie itself based on Slender Man and taking the established mythos and playing around with those tropes into something new (ala Marble Hornets) would have given the film a boost, albeit a little troublesome considering the implications of the character following the 2014 incident, but alas.
• Vanilla Protagonist: The main characters are this to a fault. It's made painfully apparent that Slender Man is the focal point of the movie, rather than the main characters who are trying to deal with him. To elaborate, Halley's defining character trait is "sports" and "dating football love interest", Wren's character is "nervous" (after a while), Lizzy's character is "naive", and Katie's is "occult".

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