Over the last 19 months, the Slender Man stabbing case and the court proceedings that have followed have captured national and international headlines.
Now the story of two Waukesha middle-school girls who nearly stabbed their classmate to death in 2014 to gain favor with a fictional Internet horror character called Slender Man is coming to the big screen.
"Beware the Slenderman" documentary will premiere at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas, in March. The documentary is also reportedly going to be aired on HBO in the fall.
Telling the tale
According to a preview of the 117-minute documentary on the film festival's website:
"'Beware the Slenderman' tells the story of the Internet's elusive Boogeyman and two 12-year-old girls who would kill for him. Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier lured their best friend into the woods, stabbed her 19 times, then set out on an odyssey to meet the tall and faceless man known online as Slenderman."
According to a documentary synopsis, the film was shot over 18 months with "heartbreaking access to the families of the would-be murderers."
The film also "plunges deep down the rabbit hole of their crime, a Boogeyman and our society's most impressionable consumers of media. The entrance to the Internet can quickly lead us to its dark basement, within just a matter of clicks. How much do we hold children responsible for what they find there?"
According to police, Geyser and Weier learned about Slender Man through the Creepypasta Wiki website.
The documentary is directed by Irene Taylor Brodsky, an Oscar-nominated, Emmy and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker.
When the documentary airs, it will be the first time the public has heard from the families of Geyser and Weier. Both of the girls' parents are present at all of the court hearings but do not address the media.
The family of the stabbing victim, Payton Leutner, meanwhile, gave an exclusive interview to ABC's 20/20 during the fall of 2014.
Cases' current status
The cases for Geyser and Weier continue to be in a holding pattern, with the attorneys for Geyser and Weier appealing a judge's decision in that kept the cases in the adult court system.
The attorneys are seeking to get the cases moved to the juvenile court system. But Judge Michael Bohren said transferring Geyser and Weier to the juvenile system would "unduly depreciate the seriousness of the offense."
With Weier's attorneys and the state of Wisconsin requesting extensions for briefs related to the transfer, a status conference that had been scheduled for January has been pushed back until April 21 at the Waukesha County Courthouse.
The girls have remained confined to a juvenile detention center in West Bend, a facility in which they have been housed at since being charged with attempted first-degree intentional homicide.
Geyser, who Leutner said is the one who stabbed her with a knife in David's Park on May 31, 2014, following a birthday party sleepover, has been diagnosed with early onset schizophrenia. Medical professionals say Weier was suffering from a shared delusional at the time of the attack.