Confirmed: Slender Man Really Did Start With the Tall Man from PHANTASM

We've written before about the long rumored family resemblance between the Tall Man and Slender Man, the internet's most famous homegrown boogeyman. The connection always seemed too obvious to be a coincidence: a gaunt, unnaturally tall figure in a dark suit, lurking at the edge of grainy photographs, stalking children. Now, thanks to some impressive digging by fans, we can move this one from rumor to record.

The original Slenderman image creation from 2009…

A newly unearthed Something Awful forum exchange from 2009, the very year Slender Man was born, shows creator Victor Surge (Eric Knudsen) answering a fellow poster who asked where he sourced the character. Surge explained that while the concept sprang from his own fears and the name was invented on the fly, the actual image he used to build a couple of the original photoshops was "the creepy tall guy from Phantasm," with the face and tentacles painted from scratch over that base.

the original and unearthed slenderman origin story mentioning phantasm…

And it gets better. A fan researcher on X believes they've now identified the exact image Surge worked from: not a film still at all, but a product photo of the Tall Man figure from NECA's Cult Classics line.

The PHANTASM action figure that inspired Slenderman

That figure hit shelves in 2005, a few years before the infamous photoshops appeared, so the timeline fits. Put the original black and white Slender Man photo next to the figure and the match in posture and proportion is hard to unsee.

The researcher that cracked the Slenderman origin case…

There is also a hearty discussion over on Reddit as well. So there it is. The creature that spawned a decade of creepypasta, games, and films was built, quite literally, on the Tall Man's frame.