the stabbing case: the misinterpretation and misrepresentation of the case in most media and discussions (and how this then excludes conversations about what actually happened, which though very specific, also did arise from these conditions, and is worthy of analysis–IMO, particularly around the transferral of belief from the girl who had schizophrenia to the one who didn’t).
the mythology itself: as something that i’m just absolutely fascinated by. i think the story is interesting, as someone who likes horror, but i’m really interested in how people clung onto it and used it as a medium to create these stories where they were kind of like avatars within this collectively constructed universe.
One of the primary strands that started me on my research for this thesis was the Slenderman stabbing in Waukesha, Wisconsin in 2014. The sensationalized version of events is that two middle school girls took their friend into the woods, stabbed her (and left her for dead, though she did survive) in order to win the favor of “Slender Man”–a figure of digital horror folklore. The amount of nuance the case received, even in academic writing, is negligible.
In the media, the internet and the horror genre were maligned. There was a call for greater surveillance and control over what young people do online. The girls were typically framed as either unable to differentiate between reality and narrative because of their age, or accused of lying to cover their desire to commit violence (which was unsurprisingly grounded in misogyny, ageism, and eventually sanism/ableism). When crusade against horror communities online died down, and more details were revealed about the girls’ mental states the case was largely written off as a weird and specific event that wouldn’t occur again and didn’t need to be analyzed further.
The reality of the case is perhaps more heartbreaking, less sensational, and more in need of an in-depth analysis. Five months after the stabbing, Morgan Geyser, one of the perpetrators, was diagnosed with early-onset childhood schizophrenia and oppositional defiant disorder. She had been experiencing hallucinations from as early as three years old. It is likely that she had self-diagnosed (given her internet searches and trial examinations) but had kept it to herself out of protection of her internal world. Her family didn’t tell her until after her diagnosis that her father has schizophrenia as well.
(It is important to me to clearly state early into this that people with schizophrenia are not inherently dangerous. There is statistical data that suggests that individuals with schizophrenia have a minimally (~5%) higher rate of violent offense, which seems to be entirely tied to a comorbidity with substance abuse. The root of the violence in this case is the lack of support that a young girl received re: the reality she was experiencing and its inconsistencies with the realities of others.)
Around this same time, the second perpetrator, Anissa Weier, was diagnosed with schizotypy–which can appear in adults as eccentric or religious beliefs.
In Beware the Slenderman, Geyser’s father highlights the role of belief and delusion in his experience as a person with schizophrenia, saying, “I know the devil’s not in the backseat, but, the devil’s in the backseat”–highlighting the simultaneous cognitive understanding that something isn’t real, but the embodied and affectual sense that it is.
In the wake of the Slenderman stabbing, one girl was diagnosed with early onset schizophrenia, and the other was diagnosed with schizotypy.
how these diagnoses relate to constructions of reality (and the line where something psychologically becomes a delusion, or psychosis)
also curious about where we do/don’t deem these beliefs appropriate/acceptable (schizotypy/schizotypal personality disorder can be tied to unconventional/magical/paranormal/supernatural belief, but also religious belief)
how their shared beliefs were constructed through their bond, because of their shared identity of isolated girls