Beware the Slenderman

Today I saw Beware the Slenderman, a documentary about the stabbing of Petyon "Bella" Leutner.

Two years ago this week, Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier had a sleepover at Morgan's house with the victim. They woke up in the morning, had doughnuts and strawberries for breakfast, and asked Morgan's mother if they could go to the park. Without hesitation, she told them they could. Once there, they initiated a fake game of hide-and-seek (though Bella didn't want to play) and brutally stabbed her 19 times, missing a major artery by just a millimeter. They left her for dead, but she crawled her way to an area where a bicyclist discovered her and called for help. When questioned about why they did it, they both blamed a fictional boogie man named Slenderman.

Bella is alive today—physically recovered from her injuries, but continuing to battle the emotional scars left by the event. Morgan and Anissa are being held in separate locations (Morgan in a state hospital; Anissa in a juvenile jail) as they await word on a decision about their case.

This film explores what led each of the accused to commit such a heinous act, with frank, tragic conversations by both sets of parents. In Anissa's case, it's the classic problem of being bullied; not having a lot of friends; feeling an outcast. She wasn't inherently evil; just a 'follower' prone to frightening easily. In Morgan's case, she is mentally ill and the parents saw signs at a young age. Additionally, mental illness runs in their family, so they knew she had a genetic predisposition for it.

The story is both fascinating and disturbing—how seemingly normal kids with loving families can go so horribly wrong in the blink of an eye. Extensive footage is shown of each girl's interrogation with detectives and there's a shocking lack of remorse in both instances. Anissa asks how far she walked out of the woods because she was "never very athletic" and Morgan questions Bella's condition without so much as a tear. Not what you'd expect from two humans who committed a vicious act of brutality just hours earlier.

My main issue with the film is the lack of information and attention for the victim. Sure, we're all interested in understanding why such a crime happened, but I inadvertently found myself sympathizing with the parents and friends of the accused rather than thinking of Bella. Perhaps her family didn't choose to participate in the documentary (that would be perfectly understandable), but there were still ways the filmmakers could have represent her more prominently, even in the absence of interviews.

I also could have done less with the dramatic music in certain sequences. Really, the true story is awful enough to invoke horror.

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