Identity Interlude

I love horror films, especially Italian horror. Dario Argento’s movies from the 70s-80s are among my favorites for being so beautifully brutal. Suspiria is a gorgeous film. His movies also usually have an awesome soundtrack.

It’s not just Italian horror that I like though. I love Nightmare on Elm Street, The Howling, Nosferatu, Paranormal Activity 1 and 2, Imprint, Perfect Blue, The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari and practically anything involving Vincent Price, to name a few

Knit Wolf, these things may seem meaningless to everyone else, but they are important to you. Remember and hold on to them

Bittersweet

In a previous post I mentioned taking in all the information I could find about Slendy. This, of course included reading various blogs. Out of those that I found, one blog stood out to me. It belonged to OnePoundofFlesh, a man claiming to be a serial killer.

I was fascinated. Even after it became clear that this was no joke.

And the things he said seemed to strike a chord with something deep inside…

It was already present…

A whisper in the back of my mind that was growing stronger

I’m not blaming him for my decisions, however. I know that they were mine and mine alone

Aside from one lightly mocking comment in February, I observed him quietly until late April. From there, things changed radically.

Sleep deprivation

can be used as a means of interrogation, which has resulted in court trials over whether or not the technique is a form of torture.

Under one interrogation technique, a subject might be kept awake for several days and when finally allowed to fall asleep, suddenly awakened and questioned. Menachem Begin, the Prime Minister of Israel from 1977–83, described his experience of sleep deprivation as a prisoner of the NKVD in Russia as follows:

In the head of the interrogated prisoner, a haze begins to form. His spirit is wearied to death, his legs are unsteady, and he has one sole desire: to sleep... Anyone who has experienced this desire knows that not even hunger and thirst are comparable with it.

- Taken from the Wikipedia article

After creating the initial two dolls

I started getting requests from people to make more. Since I now had a set pattern, I was able oblige swiftly. I did so innocently enough at first, but it wasn’t long before my nightmares told me the truth of what I was doing. Every doll that I made, every sweet little nightmare I created, marked the ones who received them. In my dreams I saw him stalking them.

I was spreading his plague.

Why didn’t I stop?

At first I was in denial. I tried to tell myself that they were just dreams and I was probably just creeped out by the stories I had read about him

Then he started appearing while I was awake and my denial turned to fear.

There was another reason why I continued to work with him, but I’ll come back to that later

How I got myself into this

I’m not one of those people who watched Marble Hornets one day and was seeing Slender Man in the refrigerator the next. No… Things happened a little differently for me.

I did watch it of course. I thought it was a good story, but nothing came of it. Nothing happened until I got a certain idea in my head. I decided to see if I could knit a Slender Man doll. Better yet, I would make two; one with the more human appearance, the other with the many limbed appearance. Even at that time I was no stranger to making odd little stuffed toys. Taking frightening things and making them look cute and innocent was, and still is, my specialty, so it seemed like a natural progression.

The thing you have to understand here is that when I get into a project, I tend to immerse deeply. For example, when I knitted a stuffed toy of a centipede, I looked at all sorts of pictures of their anatomy and watched nature documentaries about them. It took me two months to make the Slender Man dolls. Every day I worked on those dolls, I was taking in all the information I could find about him.

Thinking back on it now, thinking back to all the energy I put into my work, it was not surprising that I eventually started to see him.

These were the pictures that I posted of those first two dolls. That was back in January. Not very long ago but it feels like it could have been years.

I’m not sure how to begin…

I guess I’ll just start by explaining a few things first.

This is my second attempt at a blog. My first is still ongoing but it deals mostly with my quirky little stuffed toys and my market/convention appearances and I don’t want it to be completely taken over by the things that I’m dealing with right now

A good portion of what you see, at least at first, will be re-postings of things I’ve said on other blogs that are relevant to the situation. Why? Well one reason will be to help anyone bored enough to read this to understand what I’m babbling on about. The other reason… well… I really don’t know what’s going to happen to me during the coming months, so I might need this in case I start to lose myself.

I will probably just stop here for now. I know I probably sound terribly cryptic, but there is a fair amount to tell and I don’t want to overwhelm you. I also have the tendency to be rather verbose in a TL;DR world so I want to exercise some brevity where I can manage it.