After years of fervent online fascination and moral panic, the Slender Man is at long last damned with his own mediocre, teenage-oriented horror film. The young actresses are decent: Joey King, similarly terrorized last year in the significantly worse Wish Upon, is a charismatic actress awaiting superior material, and Julia Goldani Telles reminds me of Rooney Mara (who, of course, headlined the poorly regarded Nightmare on Elm Street reboot shortly before such prestigious films as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Carol). There are also a few inventive, macabre visuals with a certain '90s-music-video flair; the eeriest scene involves contorted faces in a hospital corridor. Slender Man himself is a striking sight, with his gaunt, outsize silhouette and smoothly anonymous non-face, though his physicality is frequently obscured and underutilized. And the film in general is simply too perfunctory: too many low-brow jolts, too much expository Googling, too many teenagers living unburdened by parents in spacious-and-poorly-lit homes. The terror is generic and unpersuasive, and the story ends tepidly.

Did it scare you?

Nah. It is super sanitized and teen friendly. I cannot imagine it scaring many people.

There are a couple scenes in this film's trailer which are not in the finished product. Which is not a revelation, particularly for a horror film, but they seem interesting and suggest a degree of post-production studio interference. One is the main character's love interest jumping from the top of a building. Another is the African American friend stabbing herself in the eye. (Both characters' fates are left oddly ambiguous in the final cut.) They also cut the scene of the main character wandering out of the forest, dazed and bloodied.