"His face was so white and--and soft! It looked dead--it looked as if it had been dead a long time."
--Robert Chambers, The King in Yellow
Over half a year ago, I fell in love with the neo-myth revolving around the Slender Man, not just because of the character's inherent creepiness, but because of how pervasive the overall concept of the Slender Man was. A mish-mash of archetypes collected from users of the Something Awful forums, the Slender Man felt vivid and haunting. The broad idea - a black-suited, pale-faced man, not-of-this-Earth, eternally silent and distant - seemed to never run out of analogues in horror. Along with the quote mentioned above, I've found a few more examples.
"Hush," from Season Four of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, features an invasion of the Gentlemen. Black-suited, pale-faced, not-of-this-Earth, eternally silent and frequently, as seen above, distant. Somewhat unsurprisingly, the Gentlemen came from a nightmare Joss Whedon had as a child.
The entire first season of Fringe features an enigmatic man called the Observer. In this picture, from "The Equation," the thin, black-suited, pale-faced figure (with possible interdimensional qualities), waits for a bus. While he lacks the homicidal nature of previous examples, the Observer's detachment and distance makes him a memorable variation on the Slender Man.
Lastly, the Marble Hornets gang recently returned to give us a few more videos chronicling lead character Jay and his encounters with the Slender Man. The creators call him the "Operator," but it's pretty clear what they're up to. Their newer videos, while heavy on intertitles that say little more than what we see, still gain a lot of shudders, thanks to how consistently we are denied images of the Slender Man. So when he shows up in Entry #29, there's power in the image.
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