Postmodern Horror: The Slender Man Mythos and House of Leaves

For any avid readers of novels riddled with mind-screws, multiple narratives, and horror you've probably read Danielewski's House of Leaves, for those who haven't a brief summary. A family moves into a house, the father (for no discernable reason) decides to measure out the house to every inch to make sure it meets the dimensions in the schematics. He finds and incosistancy of 1/4 inch and this bothers him to the point of obsession, then the dimensions of the house change and he and some mates go explore an enormous cavern inside of a closet within the house and the horrors commence.

yeah...something like that

But what fascinates most readers is its style. Footnotes can go on for pages, their are books within books, multiple and distinctive narratives.

In the last few years along the underbelly of the internet, The Slender Man Mythos has been popping up. Stories about him describe a mysterious being who rather slim, faceless, and kills or torments victims into insanity.

What's different about Slender Man is that he is the product of no one author. He is a mutated urban legend that never gathered enough momentum to escape cyberspace. Anyone with a keyboard and wifi can add to the story and that's what makes him more opaque and uncomfortable.


Somehow they reminded me of each other.As if they were two sides to one coin complimenting and foiling the other.


Slender man is the logical extreme and foil to Danielevski's work. Here's how.

• Within House of Leaves, Danielevski masquerades as at least a half dozen authors, for Slender Man the mythos is actually built up around the stories of more than two dozen authors
• The dimensions and measurements of the house are subject to change, Slender Man's entire story is subject to change due to unlimited authorship
• Both entities often drive their victims to madness but rarely kill them outright
• Their method of killing is not well defined
• Both have no faces (bonus points because Slender Man has a head)
• Both are mute
• Both have no explained motives
• The house exists in a fixed location and is stationary, while Slender Man can be anywhere and stalks.
• The house destroys a family, Slender Man prefers solo victims

But the best part of these two is that they represent different evolutions of a story in the same post-modern world. House of Leaves is like Community, in that some of its only good if you get the reference. The Slender Man is like what Japan does to every single popular story. Take Battle Royale, it has book which led to movie and a manga and sequel and merchandise etc. Slender Man has films, stories, comics, art, and forthcoming books. It proves that even no one is getting paid people love different flavors of the same damn desert.

The Many Avatars of 'The Crazy Guy' in Sitcoms

Everyone can agree that Seinfeld really set some trends in the ways of sitcoms. It told us that our main characters didn't have to be immediately likable, but that they could be shallow, petty, and we would still watch them and sympathize with them. And while the trend for more realistic and less noble characters has been continued it also set into foreground a new character, 'the crazy guy.'

You see, before if there was a crazy character, his zaniness and social ineptitude was the main draw (Mork and Mindy, Kenan and Kel) or they were a gimmick character (Family Matters). Seinfeld brought in Kramer as a median, as character in a larger cast who neither hogs the focus nor does he shy away from it. Half his appeal is his interaction with other main characters as we've all enjoyed George's endless consternation at Kramer's lifestyle.

They success and culture magnitude of the show has left us with the idea that we now need a crazy guy to pull the characters into wacky situations they couldn't have created on their own and make them more relatable as foils to someone off their rocker, yet hilarious.

So Examples are in order

Cosmo Kramer - Seinfeld

Source of Income - ???

Ability to Land Women - Fantastic and Unexplained

Catchphrase - Yes

Wacky adventures outside of group - Constantly

Least sober in Group? - Probably

Lewis - The Drew Carey Show

Source of Income - Drugco then ???

Ability to Land Women - Oddly good for his character

Catchphrase - Sort of

Wacky Adventures Outside of Group - They've involved gorillas and pools of margaritas

Least sober in Group - Works at a Drug company

Quagmire - Family Guy

Source of Income - Pilot and ???

Ability to Land Women - Baffling and Rapey

Catchphrase - Many

Wacky Adventures Outside of Group - Indeed

Least Sober in Group - Depends on the episode

Taco - The League

Source of Income - ???

Ability to Land Women - Fantastic, Unexplained, and Effortless

Catchphrase - Sometimes

Wacky adventures outside of group - Yes

Least sober in Group? - Always, and lampshaded

Barney Stinson - How I Met Your Mother

Source of Income - ???...er works in same building as Marshall

Ability to Land Women - Fantastic and Legendary

Catchphrase - So many

Wacky adventures outside of group - Referenced in nearly every episode

Least sober in Group? - Normally

This whole thing is weird because they are all iterations of the same hyperspecific trope character. But you many say, but that's only five characters. So I extended it to more shows focused on friends.

Phoebe - Friends

Source of Income - ???

Ability to Land Men - Sure

Catchphrase - Sort of

Wacky Adventures outside of Group - Yes

Least Sober in Group - Definitely

The Slutty One - Sex in the City

Source of Income - Party Planning but it makes no fucking sense

Ability to Land Men - Every appearance

Catchphrase - More like quotes

Wacky adventures outside of group - Constantly

Least sober in Group? - Yes

Jessa Johansson - Girls

Source of Income - Nanny? (Like Samatha makes too much money)

Ability to Land Men - Seduces for fun

Catchphrase - Like Samatha, just memorable quotes

Wacky adventures outside of group - Constantly

Least sober in Group? - Yes

Turns out the need of a wacky wheel on sitcom car is something women support as well.

This fascination with characters that float in a limbo between charm, surreality, and insanity has evolved to the point where they've supplanted the main cast of straight men entirely.

Neurotic and Relatable Crazy

Nutty and Zany Crazy

Batshit Crazy

For all of these only Jim and Stanley of The Office can be considered a sane man in a cast of otherwise crazy.

The Buddy Sitcom or Three Guys, A Girl, and Some Sexism

As I've said, my next door neighboors are in love with How I Met Your Mother and they got me in the show as my asking to borrow sugar or milk just turned to me coming over to see Neil Patrick Harris do something kitschy and find out when Ted finally pokevolves into Bob Saget.

 

After being jilted as a viewer by the fantastic pointlessness of Stella, I opted to watch some of the earlier episodes. In the very beginning of the show Robin does not exist as main character, she's just some extension of Ted's love life. The cast proper is just Barney, Lily, Marshall, and Bob Saget's retroactively younger persona. The show centers around them, we learn about Marshall and Lily's relationship and how crazy Barney is and how Ted needs to find love right fokken now, but Robin as a character is flat.

So we have three guys and a girl and this for some reason struck me as relevant. Then I started thinking about other sitcoms and realized how consistent this was for shows about friends.

Mind you, this is only in reference to shows about friend who's only connection is friendship, so this excludes all family sitcoms (Arrested Development, Everybody Loves Raymond, Home Improvement, Boy Meets World, Two and a Half Men, etc) or sitcoms pertaining to co-workers (Scrubs, The Office, 30 Rock, etc). If the show calls for just friends, you'll have 3 guys and girl or something very close.

So let's move backwards.

How I Met Your Mother (before we all loved Robin)

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (before Danny DeVito jumped on board)

The Drew Carey Show

Seinfeld

Then we have shows that fall in nearly the same formula, but only add guys

It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia's later seasons

The Girl was cast as eye-candy

The Girl is in-universe eye-candy

Why this is Sexist
Already we're seeing a pattern of disproportionate gender representation. It seems that on shows aimed at a general audience (men and women) there remains a dearth of ladies to go around. So while a family sitcom can have an even distribution (cause it would be weird if there were no aunts or moms) and work sitcoms need the equality (cause it would be really weird if Jim and Dwight from The Office just worked with a bunch of dudes), the buddy sitcom is where network sexism really shows its face.
I'm sure a lot of women want to bring up Sex and the City, Will and Grace, The New Adventures of Old Christine, or something along that vein, but being realistic those are shows that were never made for a general audience. They were made for the viewer with a penchant for expensive shoes and lacking a Y chromosome.
That 70's Show and How I Met Your Mother are the only shows that come to mind that actually have more than a lone girl on the main cast. Of course they loose points both having female characters who are in relationships (nearly) the whole show. So don't expect too many single and independent ladies on the primetime sitcom slot.
But good job Community on having a nearly even cast, 4:3 is impressive ratio...unless we count Chang.

Which the picture on Hulu does...well 5;3 ratio

Interconnectivity in Media Part 1 : Films with Footnotes

My next door neighbors love weed and How I Met Your Mother, and more so the two in combination. I'm often over at theirs watching Neil Patrick Harris be awesome and Ted be, well a pussy. Then they started referencing the real world, moreover in real time e.g. Marshall referencing that Stella hasn't had sex since The Da Vinci code came out as a book. This put actually contemporary media in an elevated place.

With the glut of sites for watching TV and movies online and the increasing connectivity in society, the televisual media has followed suite and done so with gusto. Due to a terminal combination of not owning a television and not giving a shit, I catch the hot new shows with consistent irregularity, save a few (Family Guy, Primeval, Misfits, The Office, etc.)

James Woods' stomach vagina teaches us the evils of televisual addiction

But even among the dearth of shows and movies that I watch, I've noticed a significant trend of them recognizing one another as media.

On Family Guy, Peter questions when/why Ted from How I Met Your Mother eventually pokevolves into Bob Saget, the show's narrator (with good reason). On How I Met Your Mother, Marshall compares he and Barney's lives to the characters of Mad Men.

I'm wholly unsure what my reaction should be. Are shows admitting to their ephemeral statuses? How can they be so unafraid of isolating their audience to only those who watch other shows?

I blame the Simpsons and  Seinfeld's constant and carefree references to both then-current events and pop-culture throughout their runs. Seinfeld is still hilarious, but when I watch re-runs, like the episode where Jerry's exceptionally Jewish mother complains about his disrespect for Schindler's List I notice that my fellow viewers who are younger are missing out on the funny. As this becomes more common, the concept of timeless comedy is being tossed aside in favor of jokes for the nonce that can become irrelevant and opaque a few seasons after its debut.

Dinosaurs,  irrelevant to this post

My real worry is when this sort thing becomes more widespread in movies. In Zack and Miri Make a Porno the cameraman discusses J. J. Abrams' Lost, the epitome of television drama blueballs, mocking its commonly known sporadic pacing, dense storyline, and lack of answers (again, with good reason). The operative words are 'commonly known'. At the time of the its release in 2008 ,with Lost having been off the air for 2 years now, a rewatch makes the joke grow more and more stale, especially if someone never watched Lost to begin with.

Will the future result be DVDs (no those too will be irrelevant) with optional asterisk to appear whenever a joke becomes too esoteric?

It seems that the only branch that is immune to the compulsive need to reference something else is Science Fiction. Possibly due to science fiction writers' need to create new universes.

In all fairness, Dune is the shit

While running from giant sea snakes/rock monsters/bats/robots/monster of the week and fighting the evil corporation is a timeless and accessible story, the writing is rarely good enough that it doesn't also get pushed into some terrible dead of uninterested viewers.

American Dialects preserved by Drugs

I tried marijuana once. Then repeatedly for between my junior year of high school and sophomore as an undergraduate. It was a phase I went through that help me waste a lot of time, meet a lot people, and learn an enormous amount of slang.

Having not purchased in more than a year, I forgot the absolute lexical fluidity in the drug user's cant so when I was watching my little and his roommate refer to hits from a gravity bong as a swat I was incline to comment.

an ultimately irrelevant photo

We've all been on youtube, better yet we've all watched television, even better yet we've all read a newspaper. What these three media all have in common is that they each help to standardize a language and render null dialectical differences. The various forms of Italian in the 1920's could almost be viewed as different language. Today, thanks to mass media influence standard Italian has not only gained a foothold but is massacre-ing regional variants.

take that dialetto Romanesco!

The same is widely true across the States, but with some exceptions, specifically drug lingo. I came to learn that swat is a hit from a g-bot common used in the St. Augustine/Jacksonville area of Florida.

On shows like Weeds, Breaking Bad, and any show where a character does drugs, they can say herb, ganja, pot, cannabis because they are widely known. To incorporate a specific area's slang would only serve to confuse and alienate the audience as opposed to simply using a commonly known term like grass. Shows don't even touch on the various strains and grades of drugs (save the occasional chance for a writer to make up some ridiculous name like 'The dank stank' or 'Big Daddy Snowbeast' because its confusing for the housewife tuning in for a story that exciting and sexy because someone mentioned hash.

While regional names for U-turns might die out (except in Minnesota)

for them its called 'whipping a shitty'

the ones for weed, cocaine, and ecstasy will retain their geographic loyalty.

So when in the future when California and New York based telemedia has destroyed all differences in American dialects, you might only be able to tell that someone's from Texas by their word for weed.

and the hat

Working at China 28 and Being White

During my high school years, I worked a job as a takeout for a Chinese restaurant in order to make some extra cash. While the job might seem light a straight forward process of simply transporting food and collecting money, it isn’t. The money is all right, but they never warned you about the customers.

My most sane customer

After my first two hours as a delivery driver, I began to form a pattern to my work. I grew comfortable with my relationship with the customer as someone polite, foodbearing, and anonymous. Intimate enough that they recognize my face and I know they’re gastronomic preference but there the line is drawn.

Unfortunately hour three ruined my line.

I received my first of many strange requests on the phone.

“Come ‘round to the side of the house and knock three times.” The voice was scratchy. This man knew the Coolidge years. The request seemed reasonable.

At the side door I knock. A lack of response asks for a second rap on the door.

“I’m coming” the interior of the house says.

The door opens and I’m presented with an old man and an overwhelming smell of peanuts and marijuana. All my olfactory senses were gently caressed by the smell of circus run by Cheech Marin.

wouldn't it be wonderful?

“Come on in.” I pause, I know that this is outside my standard protocol born two hours ago but before I can say no he's grabbed my arm and pulled me in. He talks to me for a bit, while I lean uncomfortably against his dryer. The dryer smells oddly like neither weed or nuts but of mustard. He talks a bit longer hands me the money with a whooping cough every third word and then let's me go. Most importantly, with a nice tip.

After another month I quickly realized how common this sort of thing would be.

When you work with someone you can't communicate with you begin to be able read their face, you learn their hands.

This usually means 'hunger'

To know when they’re listening and when they’re paying lip service. My boss Annie had minimal skills with English so when her daughter wasn’t around she would just nod and wait until she heard a food name. A caller could say anything but until they got to General Tsao’s chicken or Shrimp Lo Mein Annie just wasn’t listening. But they never said that your customers would make absolutely absurd requests.

It was never until I arrived at these houses that I would come to know whatever Annie had unknowingly agreed to.

My co-worker had once been asked to return to house with the expressed purpose of bringing no less than 60 packets of duck sauce. Another required an entire gallon of wanton soup, when the delivery was made I noticed a lack of other persons.There will always be my favorite question - "What goes best with 2001 Space Odyssey?"

Chicken Lo Mein, the answer is Chicken Lo Mein

I was forever bothered by bizarre questions concerning the food contents.

“There’s no pork in that, right?” someone would ask.

“You ordered Shrimp fried rice.”

“Yeah, but there’s no pork in it right?”

“Right.” I'd say.

"What about cat?"

"Excuse me?"

"Cat, is there cat meat in it?"

"No."

One woman was always in a bend over the sauces.

“Excuse me; is this soy sauce low sodium?”

Like every takeout place in America, we don’t make the sauce. Of course I couldn’t say this.

“Yes.” I lied.

After being asked if the wonton soup could be served without wantons or if the fortune cookies could come chocolate covered I learned that the customer is always right, most especially when they’re not.

What seemed a simple transportation stint, quickly began a learning experience about how bizarre people are in their own homes. Everyone seems to let their guard down for the delivery guy, but no one tells you what that really means. I was on their territory so they were always king in a bathrobe with classic rock on the stereo.

J.K. Rowling gets a Dinosaur: How we've changed Nomenclature

If you've ever read one of those 'Field Guides to American Wild Life' or heard the name homo sapiens you've got some vague familiarity with scientific nomenclature. The lofty system of classifying living things and giving them uncomfortably long Greco-Roman names, well except when we got to Africa and somehow got lazy with names like gazella gazella and gorilla gorilla gorilla.

Clue-neither are cheetahs.

Latin for this 'cutefusing'

But it seems that either scientists have run out of greek and latin words or they are just giving into their true geek desires. Case in point a dinosaur discovered recently named Dracorex hogwartsia, or if you don't speak latin 'the dragon-king of Hogwarts.' To clarify while Sirius Black was named after a nearby star named from Greek and Remus Lupin's name is taken from the myth of a man raised by wolves Romulus and Remus and lupus is latin for wolf, Hogwarts is nothing classical. Just warts on a hog.

Moral of the story, those fancy names are gonna be replaced by science fiction and fantasy references. Coincidentally, Dracorex was on Primeval, the British science fiction programme about prehistoric monsters and time portals. Clearly all involved know their audience.

Next exhibit, planet Xena named after the sexual ambiguous warrior princess who gave nerds another reason to fantasize over mythology while thinking about girls in leather. While the celestial body 'official' name is actually Eris, the research team that discovered it referred to it as Xena for so long that the name stuck in the astronomical community.

Hell, Arthur C. Clark predicted that we would run out of names from the Greek Pantheon in Rendez-vous with Rama, hence the name Rama (The seventh avatar of Vishnu, for those not into Hindu mythology). He just didn't expect it so soon.

as if we needed another

Of course when the new scientists aren't naming things after magic places, or Greek warwomen, they simple name something after themselves. Like John Cleese. Yes, John Marwood (sweet middle name) Cleese of Monty Python. Fun fact, John Cleese loves lemurs so much that he makes regular expeditions to Madagascar to visit them and makes of 98% of the funding for various organization to protect them. Which bring us to avahi cleesei or the Bemaraha wooly lemur or better yet the John Cleese lemur.

Cleese and a lemur, my point exactly

So say good by to confusing Greco-Roman names like Monodon monoceros and prepare for for fish and dinosaurs named after Battlestar Galactica and the beasts of Mordor.