Creepypasta Movies 2

A while back I wrote about some movies based on creatures centered in tons of Creepypastas. Well I watched some more, and here they are.

Fathom (2013)
Directed By Justin Jones
Written By Alexander Crews

I want to mention that the director did a lot more than direct. He's also credited as the editor, and steadicam operator. Alexander Crews is listed for cinematography as well as writing. I think it's really cool that these guys successfully have their fingers in several pies.

So this is a short film, running at 8 minutes. It focuses on a older gentleman who has been searching for Slender Man for ages after Slender Man took his sister and left only her shoes. After a lifetime of research he's not found a way to get to the Slender Man. Instead the Slender Man comes to him and offers him a way to see his sister again.

This is probably the best Slender Man film I've seen. Most are trash (thus they're not hard to beat), but this one is quality. Unlike most junk on YouTube, the audio is level, the camera is steady, and the acting is good.
Now it's not quite cinema quality, but it's very close. The only thing I'd say keeps it from being cinema quality is the Slender Man's costume. It's a dude on stilts with a white face mask and gloves. This is a practical costume which is probably done for budget reasons. I understand this, and it seems like the crew did too. And to try to enhance the costume there's an electrical interference effect, which is a nice touch. Colour grading is great too. All around it's a really well put together film. Would not be surprised if Gearmark Pictures starts having stuff widely in theatres in my lifetime.

Slender Man (2011)

This one sucks. Would not recommend anything beyond the first minutes 43 seconds. The guys screen with the camera zoom is hilarious! And same with the detective's chin scratch.

So Detective J is concerned for his brother once kids start disappearing. However his brother, Brian, doesn't like him. This is because after their father was murdered J left him and his mother. He tells J that he'll be safe, but Brian finds that he's being stalked by someone in a weird mask, and nearly everyone he's come in contact with ends up dead or missing.
Eventually Brian wakes up in the woods and gets attacked by the masked person. Mask guy reveals himself as a classmate of Brian's who has snatched Brian to use him as bait to meet Slender Man. Brian escapes the kid but then runs into Slender Man. Fortunately he knows Slender Man's "weakness" and pulls out his cellphone.
When Brian comes to again he's in his brother's car at the school. J tells him his teacher has something important for him so Brian heads into the school. J says he'll wait in the car. However he never comes back. It seems like the masked kid wants revenge.
 To be continued? No thanks.

This is the typical kids-with-a-camera quality video. It sucks. Tripod. Please. Or just stick a camera on a chair to keep it steady. But no. And then there's spelling mistakes. I'm not very good a spelling and my professional work goes through a lot of people to check that. Why didn't anyone screen for quality before releasing this video?

Screenshot from movie

Acting is not very good. Camera quality isn't that great. Cinematography isn't great. Slender Man costume is meah. The list goes on. All that being said, movies that suck like this made by a group of little kids are great first steps. My opinion, as harsh as it may seem sometimes, comes from a motion graphics and editor background. I like to see kids try, even if that means failing, because trying and failing is better than never trying at all.
And that being said, I don't think this was made by a group of little kids. I think it was made by young adults. There are simple errors that could be avoided, like spelling.
As of today there's over 1 million views. Likes and Dislikes are almost 50/50.

Butchy Kid Videos

SHOCKING SLENDER MAN VIDEO on Butchy Kid's YouTube

Butchy Kid Videos does tons of funny little videos. They're "sighting" of creatures like Slender Man, Bigfoot, Wolfman, and more. Very funny stuff. Would recommend.

Creepypasta Movies

 Silence=copy of Slender Man, yes?
Image from tumblr

I recently found out there's a Slender Man feature length movie! Called up a friend and was all like "Did you know there's a Slender Man movie?" And then I was all like "It would be awesome if there was a Rake mov---OMYGOSH THERE'S A RAKE MOVIE! Just found it on youtube!" And then I watched it, and I watched The Slender Man with my friend, and then I watched Windigo (a Slender Man movie).

The Slender Man was great. The Rake was good. Windigo sucked.

Windigo (2011)
Vince Emerson Media
Directed by James Hardiment

Oh my gosh, Windigo was bad! It was like no one had any sense of pacing.
So you got your group of students filming a documentary. Their topic is deforestation. They have two actors, a selfish impatient girl, and an oblivious idiot guy. The group is camping out on the property of the camera man's uncle, and the camera man's uncle is dirty creep by the way. The uncle is wearing the same shirt in the beginning and the end. I guess he could have done his laundry, but it's a weird choice in a movie. So the kids are trying to get interviews with locals on how deforestation has effected their professions. Most of the people either don't know what that means or like deforestation. So the kids bicker and fight amongst themselves, an Slender Man pops up here and there.

If a ninety minute movie takes seventy minutes to start, there's something wrong. Yes there are shots with Slender Man lurking the background here and there, but they're few an far between. Man it was just so bad. And yes we get there a large amount of time is going by. Yes a few days is going by. That doesn't mean you have to make the film a few days long! You edit to give a sense of time passing but cut things to keep the audience interested. Basically it could have had a shot at being good if it was compressed to maybe forty minutes.

The Rake (2011)
Enter Viral
Ken Collins

Which leads me to The Rake. I understand it was a zero budget film shot in two days. I'm not sure how long it took to edit. But basically in spite of lots of factor threatening to depreciate the ambitiousness of the film, it was well done! It was a group of dudes doing stupid boy stuff. Nothing in their actions was unbelievable either, so great job with that too! Boys do stupid things, like think they can survive in the wilderness with five bottles of water and probably no spring water filtration system. People do stupid stuff.
Three friends agree to go camping in the forest of a mountain for a month. Their goal is to be cut off from the outside and just be wilderness dudes for a while. Unfortunately after the first night one of the boys go missing. The two other wait for a while before deciding to look for him. They go towards what they believe are his screams but find nothing. Eventually another boy is stolen right out from the tent, and the one person remaining decides to make a run for it towards a road by an abandoned mine. But something gets him first.
Simple story. Not confusing. Easy to follow. It was under an hour and edited well enough to hold the audience. It had good pacing too. There are comments in youtube making criticisms here and there, but I didn't find any of them degrading to the film, if I even noticed them at all. If Windigo had edited like The Rake, it would not suck so bad. In my opinion the Rake creature was also really well done. I love how its cameos are sprinkled here and there and you could probably watch through it a few different times and see it at times you didn't notice before. Wendigo on the other hand made it pretty obvious when Slender Man was around. Yes, I understand electronics get messed up by his presence, but there wasn't much effort when hiding him in scenes.

The Slender Man (2013)
SirJohnProductions
Directed by AJ Meadows

The Slender Man was great. I was interested the whole almost eighty minutes. What was nice about that too was there were stories going on aside from merely Slender Man abducting people. The side stories all rooted from that, but there were compelling in their own way. I would equate it to how Game of Thrones has a million different stories, but eventually they all cross paths. Wendigo's side story of a bunch of kids making a documentary wasn't compelling at all. The characters were so winy you couldn't even feel bad when something happened to them! Plus their side story was about little kids making a documentary on deforestation. It's not like that's a horrible topic but they literally got no where with it except for explaining the definition of the word. All the characters were too busy wining and complaining to get anywhere else.

In spite of this mixed bag of feelings towards these movies, I honestly do love that there are so many. I love that these are stories that normal people (meaning not necesarily film students and pros) are driven to tell. I love that.
Just to throw this in, there's a theatrical slender Man movie coming out this summer. Entity. A few mixed feelings just towards the fact that this is going to be in select theatres based on demand, while pretty much everything else is free to watch on youtube, but oh well. I also don't like how Entity's t-shirt implies Slender Man is the devil, unless this movie actually is about Satan, who is for some reason faceless, extremely tall, and in a suite. But that would be really stupid. Anyway, trailer for Entity below:

Entity (2013)
East Bay Entertainment

The Slender Man (2013)
Scream1210 Productions
Directed by Michael Davis

Continuing, there is another movie titled The Slender Man on Scream1210's Youtube channel, which is pretty bad. It centers around a film student trying to unravel the mystery of a town's many missing persons reports. These reports have only became popular after a mother and her baby go missing. This 'film student' sucks at filming! Learn how to hold a camera! There are these amazing things called tripods and camera stabilizers. I don't always get the best shots when I'm shooting, but my footage is still way better than his. And shooting with a consumer camera? That's totally fine. Not everyone can afford amazing prosumer cameras, and you can still get great shots. But not checking sound levels? Oh my gosh, it's bad. The omnipotent third person camera man shots are tolerable (barely), but not the ones the protagonist shoots himself. It's just a bad film.
The film, beyond just the character's bad filming, is bad. The audio levels are inconsistent. And it sounds like lots of the tracks are made with Garage Band. I mean it's acceptable to make music with that program, but this film used just a lot of the ambient sound instruments. The thing with making films with your homies is that every other amateur is probably using similar if not THE SAME tools as you, so you need to try your best to make your use of the tools different. Don't download the most popular free sound effect if there's a lesser known one of the same quality. Don't distract your audience with poor choices on the back end. It's not the greatest when your audience can go 'Aha. I recognize that sound!' It pulls them out of your story.
Anyway, as far as the story goes, the student gets marked by Slender Man to die in five days. And he does. The end.

The Tall Man

I'm not really going to actually review this one like I usually have been. Just wanted to say how mislead I was.
Yes, it's a movie with lots of twists and turns but when I saw the name and read the IMDB summary:

When her child goes missing, a mother looks to unravel the legend of the Tall Man, an entity who allegedly abducts children. 

I was thinking 'Woah! A movie about Slender Man!'
Nope.
Not at all.
Not. At. All.

I will say that this movie partially focuses on this girl from a broken home. He mother puts up with an abusive boyfriend type person. Of course this creepy child is  the same as the little girl from the first Silent Hill movie, Jodelle Ferland, who was also a creepy little girl in Case 39, Twilight, The Collector, and Bioshock 2.

As I was saying, no Slender Man in this movie. Poo poo.
If you too were mislead, it's okay. You're not alone.