Bill Weier, father of infamous Anissa Weier has claimed Sony Pictures’ upcoming film starring horror character Slender Man is “extremely distasteful.”
In 2014, Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser, who were twelve at the time, lured classmate Payton Leutner into the woods in Waukesha, Milwaukee. Leutner was stabbed 19 times by Geyser, while Weier stood by and encouraged her. The girls then abandoned Leutner in the woods. Fortunately, the stabbings missed her heart, and Leutner was able to crawl out of the woods, where she was discovered by a bicyclist. She has since recovered from the attack.
Weier and Geyser told the court they were sacrificing Leutner to Slender Man, to prove their devotion to the fictional characters, in order to become his servants (or ‘proxies’), as well as protect their families from him. In December, Anissa Weier was sentenced to 25 years in a mental institution. Geyser will be sentenced in February.
In a telephone interview with the Associated Press, Bill Weier has condemned the upcoming film.“It’s absurd they want to make a movie like this. It’s popularizing a tragedy is what it’s doing,” said Weier, “All we’re doing is extending the pain all three of these families have gone through.”He hopes that local theatres will refuse to screen the movie upon it’s release in May.
It’s unclear whether the film will feature any elements of the attempted murder. However, the trailer features young girls wandering through the woods, and shots of strange dolls and children’s drawings, similar to the ones found in Geyser’s possession during the investigation.
A shot from the trailer, showing childrens drawings of Slender Man.
The film is directed by Sylvain White, stars Javier Botet as Slender Man, and is due for release in May 2018. Slender Man was created by Eric Knudson in 2009, who edited a spectral figure into images of children playing. You can watch the trailer and see the original image here.
