The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Tuesday, September 4, 2018— 7A

“Slender Man” is a horror 
movie released in 2018 based 
on the popular “creepypasta” 
that debuted in 2009. It is 
approximately 93 minutes long. 
It 
costars 
Joey 
King 
(“The 
Kissing Booth”). I can tell you all 
of this because the information 
is available on the Internet, yet 
despite having just seen the movie 
earlier today, I’m having trouble 
remembering a single thing that 
actually happens over its runtime. 
I’ve gone into a dissociative state 
once in my life, and honestly, this 
doesn’t feel dissimilar to that.
It’s not just that “Slender Man” 
fails at the things we expect from 
a horror movie or a movie in 
general, it’s that those things are 
completely absent. There’s no plot 
or story, there’s just one sequence 
of scares stuck to another with 
duct tape and spit. Four girls 
decide to summon “Slender Man,” 
as young girls in 2018 are wont 
to do. Uh oh, Slender Man shows 
up and does some ill-defined evil 
mumbo-jumbo with no apparent 
end goal. Then the movie ends. 

Over the 93 minutes, nothing 
anybody does makes any sense. 
The girls all just sort of accept at a 
certain point that Slender Man is 
haunting them and wait to die, and 
that’s the movie. They don’t fight 
back, because that would mean the 
writers would have to make them 

active, interesting characters, and 
who wants that?
For all the sins of the “story,” the 
characters fare somehow worse. 
None of the girls go through a 
change beyond moving from 
“not haunted” to “haunted,” but 
more than that, nobody is given 
a character to begin with. From 
beginning to end, they’re just 
featureless mannequins meant 
to carry us to the next hackneyed 
scare. Of the four girls that we 
begin the movie with, one of them 
disappears almost immediately, 
and 
another 
is 
seemingly 

forgotten by the script. The last 
two are saddled with two of the 
most laughable fates in recent 
horror history in a sequence that 
prompted one of the high-school 
aged “Slender” fans in front of 
me to stand up and declare to the 
theater and his friends, “Fuck it. 
I’m out.”
What horror there is can easily 
be divided into three camps: the 
classic jump scare, the creepy 
imagery without rhyme or reason 
and the stupid. If you’re not a fan 
of loud noises trying to tell you 
when to be scared, just wait and 
there will be a scene where a girl 
dreams she gives birth to Slender 
Man or where Slender Man uses 
FaceTime, both of which are things 
that actually happen. Perhaps the 
best thing that can be said about 
“Slender Man” is that there’s a 
variety of bad horror instead of 
just one kind. Cinematographer 
Luca del Puppo (“Mercy”) shoots 
it all in the most monotonous, 
ugly low light possible — the kind 
of darkness that will have you 
pleading for someone, anyone 
to turn on a damn light — but 
the movie is unpredictable in its 
awfulness nonetheless.
Perhaps most disappointingly, 

‘Slender Man’ falls short

JEREMIAH VANDERHELM
Daily Arts Writer

SONY PICTURES ENTERTAINMENT

FILM REVIEW

Mac 
Miller 
returned 
on 
Aug. 3rd with his fifth studio 
album, Swimming, in the wake 
of his heavily media-scrutinized 
breakup with Ariana Grande. 
Given that breakup and his recent 
DUI, expectations were that this 
album would be a depressed and 
chaotic work in the vein of his 
2014 mixtape Faces — however, 
what we’ve received instead is a 
phlegmatic piece of protracted 
contemplation, more thoughtful 
than despondent.
Swimming 
feels 
like 
the 
companion piece to his most recent 
album The Divine Feminine, a 
continuation of the jazz-influenced 
sound but with a polar opposite 
thematic message. The Divine 
Feminine was a record of love and 
optimism; Swimming is lonesome 
(but not lonely) and reflective — a 
world-weary expression of self-
acceptance. For better or for worse, 
the album tends to blur together 
due to instrumental sameness. 
Some would call this cohesiveness, 
some would call it a lack of variety; 
lean toward the latter. The addition 
of “Programs” could have lessened 
this sense of repetition, different 
enough to provide a change of 
pace but similar enough to not be a 
jarring inclusion. 
It wasn’t much of a challenge 

to improve upon the lyricism 
of The Divine Feminine, which 
was a concept album about Mac 
eating out his girlfriend. To be 
fair, if I were having sex with 
Ariana Grande, I’d probably never 
stop bragging about it either. He 

managed to step it up on Swimming, 
and now that the two are no longer 
together, Mac is forced to explore 
themes more varied than Ariana 
Grande’s vagina, including issues 
such as isolation, helplessness 
and the long-term impact of fame. 
However, despite discussing more 
serious topics, the album never 
sinks into darkness or pessimism. 
“It ain’t perfect but I don’t mind” 
Mac 
sighs/moans/sings 
on 
“Perfecto,” a line which sums up 
his overarching philosophy on 
Swimming pretty well: The way 
to deal with life’s problems is to go 
with the flow, the lyrical equivalent 
of shrugging one’s shoulders.
The standouts on the album are 
“Self-Care,” “Ladders,” “What’s 
the Use?” and “2009.” “Self-Care” 
is full of airy ambience and a well-
executed beat switch. “Ladders” 
and “What’s the Use?” are bouncy 
funk jams that are solidly in the 
pocket, 
and 
“2009” 
contains 
beautiful orchestration (courtesy 

of Jon Brion) as well as some of 
Mac’s more thoughtful lyrics as he 
reflects on his past. 
One of the weaker cuts is 
“Conversation Pt. 1,” a worse 
version of “I Am Who I Am (Killing 
Time),” the vocals and instrumental 
both dreadfully boring (surprising, 
given that Flying Lotus is credited 
with production on the track). The 
only moment of dynamism on the 
track is a lame trumpet part tacked 
on the end that sounds like a Miles 
Davis impersonator on a high dose 
of lithium. 
Given both how long Mac 
has been around and how many 
projects he has released, it’s hard 
to believe that he’s only 26 years 
old (younger than Kanye West 
was when he released The College 
Dropout!). In spite of his young age, 
Swimming feels like the reflective 
conclusion to a lengthy career. 
Because Mac started so young, 
his late-game coincides with an 
age at which he begins to ripen on 
the vine (in direct contrast with 
Kanye, whose denouncement thus 
far has consisted of becoming 
a sundowning Boomer whose 
Twitter is one step removed from 
shit like “live, laugh, love” and 
Minion memes). While Swimming 
isn’t a perfect record, and will likely 
be considered inconsequential in 
relation to Mac’s other post-Blue 
Slide Park discography, it’s a good, 
if not incredible, album with some 
standout cuts.

Mac Miller’s ‘Swimming’

JONAH MENDELSON
Daily Arts Writer

MUSIC REVIEW

there was a scenario where 
“Slender 
Man” 
actually 
had 
a purpose. Since its creation, 
Slender 
Man 
has 
become 
something of a dark mascot for 
lonely young people, climaxing 
in 2014 when two young girls 
stabbed their friend 19 times in 
order to become servants of the 
creature, as chronicled in HBO’s 
2017 
documentary 
“Beware 
the Slenderman.” There was an 
opportunity for this interpretation 

of the “Slender Man” mythos to 
engage with the same topics that 
doc covered — loneliness and how 
the internet can be used to spread 
a story — but from a different 
perspective. While there are brief, 
brief moments where these things 
are touched upon, they play almost 
no part in the story at large and no 
statement is made; it’s as pointless 
as anything else.
With a movie lacking completely 
in story, character development, 

horror and purpose, what is there 
to bring audiences to the theater? 
There’s 
some 
unintentional 
comedy to be sure — there’s a 
supposedly “scary” moment so 
soul-crushingly stupid that it sent 
the entire theater into hysterics — 
but more than anything, “Slender 
Man” is just dull. It’s an absolute 
chore to sit through in a way few 
movies are, and each successive 
scene of nothing happening just 
makes it worse.

“Slender Man”

Ann Arbor 20 + 
IMAX, Goodrich 
Quality 16

Sony Pictures 
Entertainment

Swimming

Mac Miller

Rostrum Records