>>116417111>I may propose that slender man, while the medium through which the story was told, emerged from an urban legend or "old wive's tale" all the same, just communicated through anonymous imageboards rather than campfires and word of mouth.True, but that's the thing about all of these popular monsters, and characters too. The concepts may float around for ages but it takes a central figure to make them popular.
Vampires were around for ages before Dracula, but Dracula made vampires a central monster of pop culture. You can follow this process with all other horror characters, hell, all popular characters period.
>>116415910I really don't think people appreciate enough how fucking cool it is that modern horror creations are starting to rise to the same stardom as the likes of vampires and Frankensteins. It started as just dumb internet jokes and word of mouth and then he got shows and crappy movies and tons of knock-offs and everything. It's been SO long since an entirely new category of monster has found a niche like this. And now you can fucking buy creepypasta costumes for Halloween partially because Slender Man opened the door to a whole generation to use creepypastas as the new breeding ground for horror.
I get that Slenderman's overexposure can be annoying and I don't even like the character that much but god, everytime I think to myself that horror is dying and monsters aren't appreciated anymore, I remember Slenderman and the FNAF robots exist and that kids still lovingly eat them up, and I get a little happier.
>I think we can expect rubberhose-era cartoons being the next big monster thanks to things like Bendy and Cartoon Cat.Definitely possible, but I don't think Bendy quite made the splash necessary to really kickstart that trend. But we may see something in the future really get that trend going.
I expect plague doctors to come back in style big time after everyone starts making stories about diseases and pandemics and so on.
