Slender Man Movie Director Announced

01/04/2017 10:32 pm EST

The Losers and Stomp the Yard filmmaker Sylvain White will take the reins of Screen Gems's Slender Man, Deadline reports.

The thriller will begin production by the spring.

Slender Man or Slenderman in popular culture is a supernatural character that originated as an Internet meme created on the Something Awful forums in 2009.

The character resembles a tall, thin man with a blank and usually featureless face, wearing a black suit. Created by Eric Knudsen, the being has been used in a variety of media in recent years, usually depicted as silently stalking victims.

The character has drawn similarities to entities such as "The Gentelemen" on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and "The Silence" on Doctor Who.

The feature film version of Slender Man, written by David Birke, reportedly "revolves around a tall, thin horrifying figure with unnaturally long arms and a featureless fact, who is reputed to be responsible for the haunting and disappearance of countless children and teens."

At one point, a Slender Man story was rumored to be a candidate to drive a season of American Horror Story. The claim at the time was that somebody had written a Slender Man story for TV, and that AHS wanted to adapt it to their format.

Producers denied that quickly, and not long after, it was announced that HBO was developing a TV project based on the property at the same time Screen Gems was making a movie.

It isn't clear whether the HBO series, which recently released its first trailer, has any ties to the rumored TV treatment AHS was interested in, or whether any of those Horror Story rumors were true at all.

Screen Gems has an extensive horror history, with films like The Mothman Prophecies, Boogeyman, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Hostel, and action-horror films like the Resident Evil franchise and Underworld franchise under their belts. Birke has written screenplays based on real-life killers Dahmer and Gacy, as well as horror remake/adaptation 13 Sins.

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