Characters / Slender

aka: Slender The Arrival

Here are the characters for Slender and its sequel Slender: The Arrival.

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Protagonists

Kate Milens

He's here.

The recipient of several notes found throughout the game and the owner of the house that The Arrival's prologue takes place in. Lauren spends the game searching for her. At the very end of the first level, you could hear a high-pitched scream in the woods, which presumably belonged to Kate. You later play as her in the "Escape" level. Slender Man turned her into a Proxy after he caught her, attacking the player at a couple of points in the game.

The "Genesis" level in The Arrival makes it clear that Kate was also the main protagonist of the original Slender: The Eight Pages.

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• AM/FM Characterization: Kate has a radio in her house that only seems to play country tunes whenever it's switched on. The three most prominent songs are "High Water Everywhere" by Charley Patton, "Wildwood Flower" by The Carter Family, and When the Levee Breaks by Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie.
• And Now for Someone Completely Different: You take control of her back at the house in Chapter 6.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: As the Chaser.
• Cassandra Truth: She tried to tell her doctors about her 'Hallucinations' to no avail. If CR is to be believed, it's better that they didn't believe her though.
• Damsel in Distress: Has gone missing at the beginning. The player ends up being far too late to do anything for her.
• Face–Heel Turn: She becomes Slender Man's proxy and chases Lauren in the mines. That being said, it's highly unlikely that she had much choice in the matter.
• Featureless Protagonist: In the first game. Averted in the sequel, where her face is shown.
• Missing Mom: Her mother died of unknown causes before the game starts. It's the reason she's thinking of selling the house.
• Nightmare Face: If you peel through the mask, you can see a gaping mouth with jagged skin resembling teeth◊. Jesus Christ, Slendy.
• Rogue Protagonist: CR mentions that Kate was once found unconscious in a park with strange drawings and a broken video tape, implying that she may have been the protagonist of the original game. Confirmed in the Genesis level.
• Sanity Slippage: She used to go out ghost hunting with CR back in their childhood. At one point, they started hallucinating, and she was found in a park with a broken video camera, a flashlight, and a stash of 8 pages. She was taken to a psychiatric ward, where she was deemed stable and free to go, but it all fell apart since.
• Silent Protagonist: Played straight in the original game, but subverted in The Arrival. When you play as Kate in the "Escape" chapter, she talks to her camera, saying to shut all the doors and windows. Leaving her room to do that doesn't really work out well for her. The only thing we hear from her after the point of the flashback is her scream coming from the woods at the beginning of the game.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Had she never gone to the park, the Slender Man probably wouldn't have bothered her so much.
• Walking Spoiler: Just look at all the other tropes here. It's almost impossible to talk about Kate without revealing her role in The Arrival.

Lauren

The female protagonist of the second game. Her car is parked at the head of Kate's driveway, as it was stopped by a fallen tree. She goes searching for her missing friend Kate and uncovers various pages written by her other friend, CR.

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• Featureless Protagonist: Subverted in that it's fairly obvious that you're controlling Lauren, the only other named character from the writings.
• First-Person Ghost: Apart from her shadow and her arm, we don't know what she looks like.
  • Actually, we see her in the official art for Chapter 2. She's cast in shadows, but you can make out some of her features.
• Innocent Bystander: Seems to have been this until she visited Kate's house and discovered her Room Full of Crazy.
• Not Quite Dead: The game ends as she is trapped in a room with a drained flashlight and someone (or something) opens the door to attack her. In Hardcore mode, it seems that she survives... but only because it's in the Slender Man's best interests that she lives.
  • In the Steam update, she is attacked by a proxified Charlie and taken to the burned house from the first level. After collecting several notes that reveal C.R. was a bit crazier then anyone knew when he and Kate became Runners, she discovers Kate in the second floor, who attacks her. Viewing the model that then gets dragged away shows that it's actually Kate, but the model itself is named "lauren_dead" in the files, which doesn't bode well for her survival chances.
• Silent Protagonist: Zigzagged. If you go to the swings on the first level, before entering the house, subtitles pop up. They say "I remember playing on this swing-set with Kate when we were kids". It's the first clue that you're playing as Lauren, but you never hear spoken dialogue.
  • Another set of subtitles occur when you see the missing poster. They say "I should keep an eye out", but she never speaks them.
• Uncertain Doom: Her final fate is left unclear, even in the Hardcore mode. For all we know, the camera could've just been kept on by that point.

Carl Ross

^{Click here for spoilers.}  Carl Ross' charred corpse.

The sender of several notes found throughout the game. A close friend of Kate, who is also being victimized by the Slender Man. Lauren passes another car on the way to Kate's house, which we assume belonged to him. You get to play as him in the "Homestead" level.

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• Childhood Friends: Carl apparently knew Kate since they were kids, and the two of them often explored the woods outside their homes in their youth. One of his early letters to Kate even has him reminiscing about their childhood.
• Driven to Suicide: Strongly implied. He leaves several notes declaring his desire to die and is latter found as a charred corpse in the ending.
• The Ghost: Doesn't appear in person, although his unrecognizable dead body is discovered in the ending. He's eventually Promoted to Playable in the Steam release.
• Kill It with Fire: White chalk on a rock reads "End it with a fire." His charred corpse is found in the finale scenes, possibly by his own hand.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: He tried to help Charles Matheson by figuring out what happened to his missing son Charlie. In doing so, he attracted the attention of Slender Man and doomed himself to no shortage of misery.
• Only Known by Initials: He primarily signs his letters with "C.R.", which are his first initials. He does refer to himself as his full name, Carl Ross, in his final letter found by Lauren, and before he starts investigating the Matheson household.
• Promoted to Playable: The Steam release added a new chapter in which you play as Carl Ross as he's investigating the abandoned Matheson homestead.
• Sanity Slippage: Carl goes from being relatively level-headed and investigative to going completely nuts as he learns about the Slender Man and Charles Matheson Jr. His notes show his decaying mental state, and his last recording shows him trying to convince Kate to light herself on fire along with him in order to escape Slender Man.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Same ordeal as Kate.

Charles Matheson

The father of the disappeared Charlie Matheson. Already dead by the time The Arrival starts, you get to play as him in the "Nightmare" Extended Chapter.

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• The Cynic: A note you can find in "Into the Abyss" displays just how jaded Charles became after what happened to his son. His wife left him, he lost his job and everything he's ever worked for has been taken away from him. Life itself no longer made sense to him and he became jealous and resentful of other people, because in his eyes they understand "the rules of the great game of life" and refused to share it with him.
• Driven to Suicide: Similar to C.R., the Slender Man eventually drove Charles to burn his house down with himself still inside it.
• Grief-Induced Split: He and his wife Diane split up some time after Charlie disappeared.
• The Hermit: He chose to isolate himself in his house in Oakside Park until the day he died, keeping away from human contact after his life fell apart.
• Kill It with Fire: As mentioned above, Charles eventually died when he set his own house ablaze, though it was the smoke that killed him first.
• Outliving One's Offspring: Horrifically subverted, though Charles never realized it. When the Slender Man took his son away during a normal picnic at the beach, the Matheson family eventually lost hope and thought the young boy was gone for good. Except the Slender Man never killed the boy, having instead turned him into a monster and made him visit his dear father's window until the day he died, never allowing the two to reunite.
• Posthumous Character: He's already dead by the time the game starts. Charles is only ever met or referred to in flashbacks and documents.
• Promoted to Playable: You play through one of his nightmares in the aptly named "Nightmare" Extended Chapter added in the 2023 10th Anniversary Update.
• Sanity Slippage: The Slender Man tormented this poor man for years on end with visits by his long-lost son, always out of reach. Neighbors said that Charles became easily agitated and abrasive over the years, no doubt due to the strain this put him under. "Nightmare" shows him to have picked up the same habit of drawing crazed images as Kate did.

Antagonists

The Slender Man

Always watching. No Eyes.

Our favorite faceless stalker. He's taken an interest in Kate and C.R., and goes after you when you go looking for them... and the results are not pretty.

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• Adaptational Villainy: Slender Man has always been a malevolent entity, but this portrayal of him is much more outwardly malicious, even sadistic, for no other reason than his own amusement. In other media, he rarely does anything personally and leaves his proxies to take up the spotlight, but here he actively chases Lauren down and physically hinders her progress to keep her from advancing further, while intentionally keeping her in the dark that he already accomplished his torment of her friends and he's just stringing her along with a false sense of hope. He personally ruined the lives of an entire family by kidnapping a child (Charlie Matheson) and deforming it into an emaciated monster. He drives CR, a freelance investigator, to burn himself to death in a vain effort to keep others from learning about the Slender Man. He haunts Kate Milens as far back as the first game, when she looked for notes in a forest as a kid, drives her insane and transforms her into a Slave Mook that's forced to hunt her old friend Lauren. It's even revealed that he had been stalking Kate and Charlie's families for a long, long time, and he presumably murdered Kate's parents as well.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Both The Eight Pages and The Arrival end with him victorious. He catches Kate no matter what you do in the first game and, by the time the second game draws to a close, has turned her into one of his proxies, driven C.R. to immolate himself to death and captured Lauren to do with as he pleases.
• Big Bad: He's a lot more hands-on than the typical depiction; the entirety of the conflict falls squarely on his shoulders.
• The Blank: He lacks a true face, for sure, but images in The Arrival show that he does have something, at least. We can't tell if they're wrinkles, scales or scars, or some deranged combination of the three.
• Brown Note: Whenever he's around, the screen turns static and a Scare Chord can be heard. Even if you have the camera interface off.
• Combat Tentacles: These sprout from his back, and it's completely possible to be ensnared by them. In fact, it can actually net you an achievement. The 2023 graphical update for The Arrival shows that his tentacles seem to be made out of shadows.
• Evil Sounds Deep: You won't notice until you dig around in the sound files, but this version of Slender Man is not the Silent Antagonist he usually is. Slender Man only communicates to most of the characters through text, but if you reverse some of Charlie's audio clips, you can hear him speak in a demonically deep, masculine voice that wouldn't be out of place coming from Sauron.
  Slender Man: "Keep out. Do not walk on the graves. Someone might get... angry. No one leaves here alive. There is someone buried here who wants to see you. You're getting colder."
• Foreshadowing: Pictures of him are drawn on the walls and in some notes found in Kate's room. If you look out a window after getting the flashlight, it's possible to see him simply staring at you through the window. After a few seconds, he teleports away. He also watches you in the distance as you walk towards Oakside Park, in what appears, at first glance, to be part of the skybox.
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: If you somehow manage to exit the normal play area, Slender Man will instantly teleport to you and kill you with a special message.
  Slender Man: "Not even a bug in this game can save you from me."
• Green Thumb: Slender Man never demonstrates this ability in the main game, but he briefly makes some twigs or roots grow in Charles' path partway through the "Nightmare" Extended Chapter. This is particularly notable since he's in the concrete basement of a mental hospital at the time.
• Gods Need Prayer Badly: While not a deity (as far as we know), it is heavily implied in The Arrival that his entire existence depends on people either knowing he exists or knowing about him at all. Naturally, he goes to great lengths to ensure that his presence lingers on. Those who he doesn't claim immediately go on to spread knowledge of him, while those that are unfortunate enough to succumb to Slender Man's influence become his proxies and hunt his next victims for him. This, if you believe the proxies count as people who know, renders him nigh-immortal, making C.R.'s death meaningless.
• Heads I Win, Tails You Lose: As long as you're alive, he will still stalk you. And if you die, you're dead.
• Humanoid Abomination: A lack of face, impossible height, teleportation and tentacles. That's Slender Man, alright.
• Infectious Insanity:
  • People who go insane tend to go to great lengths to let other people know about him, willingly or not. Notes in The Arrival suggest that Kate and C.R. caught a glimpse of the Slender Man when they were playing in the forest as kids, which now leads them back to him as adults. This helps out his Gods Need Prayer Badly situation and is likely deliberate.
  • The "Nightmare" Extended Chapter reveals that some kind of new experimental drug, implied to have been made with a strange black liquid found in the bloodstream of a patient, caused the patients of a mental hospital to receive visions of Slender Man, spreading his influence even further than before.
• Karma Houdini: As with most stories involving him, Slender Man faces absolutely no repercussions for the terror he has inflicted on his victims. The game also raises the implication that the only way for Slender Man to truly lose is for everyone on Earth to forget him. Suffice to say, he's not going away any time soon.
• Kill It with Fire: Not him, but many of his victims die as a result of self-immolation. The "Nightmare" Extended Chapter reveals that Slender Man himself convinces them to do this.
• Lean and Mean: One of the more chilling portrayals, given what he puts Kate, C.R., and Lauren through.
• Mascot Villain: More so than usual, as the games are flat-out called "Slender". This has had the side effect of people not familiar with the Mythos calling him "Slender" as opposed to his actual name.
• Me's a Crowd: At the end of the "Nightmare" Extended Chapter, his final method of tormenting Charles is to surround him with seemingly endless Slender Men that keep getting closer and closer while he's nearly immobilized.
• Offscreen Teleportation: Whenever you're not looking, which will be most of the time since you can't actually stare at him for too long in this game without getting a Game Over.
  • Occasionally he'll teleport while you are looking. Or into your field of vision. Hoh boy...
• One-Hit Kill: Touch him and it's game over.
• Right Behind Me: Constantly, after you've gotten up to six pages. From that point on, he'll be on you like a bloodhound! He also does this to C.R. when he enters the chapel on the abandoned Matheson farm, closing the door and staring down behind him.
• Sadist: It is clear that Kate and Lauren only ever got as far as they did because Slender Man allowed them to. With his teleportation powers and intelligence, he could've easily caught them any time he wanted to, but their struggle to escape is little more than a game to him. What he did to Charlie and the Matheson family was also needlessly cruel.
• Stalker without a Crush: To anyone who collects his notes. He won't stop until he either turns them or kills them. The Arrival shows that the notes aren't even necessary, he will stalk you just because he feels like it.
• Was Once a Man: Subverted, actually. There appears to be a connection between him and Charles Matheson Jr. (the latter's poster combines with the Slender Man in the secret level), but it turns out that Charlie's just a proxy.
• Would Hurt a Child: He abducted Charles Matheson Jr. as a child, luring him away from his parents with a few of his toys. Although it isn't known precisely what he did to him, while Charlie is still alive in the present day, he looks like a walking corpse.
• Your Mind Makes It Real: Overlaps with Infectious Insanity above, and provides one of the main sources of his terror. He could be watching you as you read this, as you play the game... and if that's the case, the games have made him immortal.

The Chaser

A Proxy found in the "Into the Abyss" level. It chases you down along with the Slender Man as you attempt to activate the generators.

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• The Dragon: For the Slender Man, naturally. Unusually, the Chaser only appears in one level with its master, at least in the initial release.
• Expy: This being written by the guys from Marble Hornets, you couldn't be blamed for seeing a resemblance to Masky.
• In the Hood: It wears a dirty, white hoodie.
• One-Hit Kill: Averted. Unlike its master, the Chaser will only injure you if it catches you. Let it catch you a certain number of times depending on the game's difficulty and it's game over.
• The Reveal: The new ending introduced in the Steam update reveals Kate is the Chaser.
• Samus Is a Girl: The jacket, the hood and the mask all make the Proxy appear rather masculine, when in reality, it's Kate.
• Tragic Villain: An innocent girl forced to kill her own friend against her will by a monster's corrupting influence.
• Weakened by the Light: If you focus your flashlight and shine it in their face, the Chaser will be blinded and stunned for as long as you hold the light on them. Doesn't make them harmless by any means though. Get too close and you still get jumped.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: In the original release of the game, the Chaser completely vanishes without a trace after Lauren leaves the mines. Averted as of the Steam update, which has it show up again at the very end of the game.
• White Mask of Doom: What at first looks to be a pale Nightmare Face actually turns out to be a mask styled after a screaming face.

Charles Matheson Jr.

^{Click here for Charlie as he is now.} 

A boy found in a missing wanted poster. In the Steam version, it's revealed that Charlie's father committed suicide after Charlie went missing, and C.R. was trying to help out the Matheson family by looking for him. Like Kate before him, he was turned into another Proxy.

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• Ascended Extra: Charlie was originally little more than a face on a missing poster. Later additions to the game made him a much more prominent figure, to the point that he has more screentime than even the Chaser.
• Berserk Button: Initially, Charlie is mostly content to stare at C.R. ominously while the latter explores the former's long abandoned homestead. He will try to chase him in the cornfield, but doesn't really put in much effort. When C.R. takes some of Charlie's old toys while investigating the chapel however, Charlie begins pursuing him relentlessly while screaming his head off.
• Body Horror: His body in the present day is incredibly malnourished, covered in burn scars and seems to be missing both eyes and the lower jaw. A far cry from the normal, friendly young boy seen on the missing posters. The 2023 10th Anniversary Update, which prominently included a complete visual overhaul of the game with modern technology, didn't do Charlie any favors, though at least it shows his jaw is still there.
• Early-Bird Cameo: His face can be seen on a missing person's poster early in the game, long before he's revealed to be important to the story. His burned down house can also be found early in the first chapter, where he's seen crying in one of the rooms deep inside. Trying to interact with Charlie results in him jumpscaring you before he vanishes.
• Eyeless Face: We don't know how he lost them, but taking a close look at his face shows that Charlie does not have eyes in his sockets.
• Humanoid Abomination: Whatever Slender Man did to him, it was not pretty. When both C.R. and Lauren encounter Charlie, he's little more than a blue, zombie-like figure with hollow eyes and a barely noticeable Glasgow Grin. He also acts less like a human being and more like a supernatural attack dog, although it's implied he's not in full control of his actions.
• Jump Scare: In the Steam version of the Prologue, if you walk around in the woods, you can find an abandoned wooden house. Enter it and you'll see a blue-ish, shirtless and deformed humanoid twitching from side to side as it looks to the wall. This is Charlie, or at least what's left of him. If you go near him, he'll lash out at you, flashing the same blue human images that can be seen in the final level.
  • At the Steam version of the final level, when you see C.R.'s corpse, Charlie's figure can be seen running straight at Lauren. It's rather jarring, as it's never been seen before in any other version.
• Mind Screw: If you keep clicking on the missing poster, you'll get wrapped in a bizarre, fucked up version of Kate's house.
  • He caused the same for his father. Charles Sr. keeps thinking that he sees his son staring at him and giggling like a kid at times. What happened to Charlie suggests and the "Nightmare" level reveals that he wasn't imagining it at all. Slender Man deliberately tormented him like this.
• Non-Malicious Monster: Despite being an emaciated, corpse-like being (presumably due to the Slender Man), he actually kept Lauren alive and guarded the stairs to keep her from seeing a Proxified Kate at the top floor. Not so much in the Homestead chapter though, where he's the main threat.
• Promoted to Playable: You briefly play as a young Charlie in the secret "Memories" level, reliving the moments that led up to his abduction.
• Reluctant Psycho: Implied. Though he's shown stalking and attacking C.R., Lauren and even his own father, Charlie does have some qualities that imply he's not as heartless as Slender Man is.
  • When C.R. first encounters him, Charlie is at first content to simply watch him from a distance while in the flickering underground cellars. It's not until C.R. goes to the cornfield after getting gas canisters for the generator on an underground cellar that he begins going on the offensive.
  • Charlie also tries to minimize the amount of harm he inflicts on Lauren, only lashing out if she finds him in his burned down house early in the game, and while he's abducting and trapping her in the Matheson basement near the end of the game. Even then, Charlie doesn't attack her unless she tries to leave without reading the information in the room she's in.
• Retcon:
  • Earlier versions the game implied that Charlie was a supernatural entity similar to Slender Man, and gave him a childlike personality that's insistent on "playing" with Lauren once she triggers his appearance by looking at his Missing Poster three times. The Steam release later establishes that while Charlie is supernatural, he's more of a bestial, burnt creature that reluctantly follows Slender Man's will, and doesn't speak to Lauren or C.R. at all.
  • In general, Charlie goes from being a small little Easter Egg that seems mostly unconnected to the story, to later being revealed to be the reason how Slender Man returned in the first place, and is involved with chasing C.R. and capturing Lauren near the end of the game.
• Was Once a Man: The Steam version of The Arrival reveals that Charlie was turned into a Proxy by the Slender Man.
• Tragic Monster: Was forcibly taken from his parents by the Slender Man and mindraped by him, ultimately being so utterly destroyed he doesn't even look human. Though he might be more intelligent then he looks, that's all he has left.
• Vader Breath: The 2023 10th Anniversary Update gave Charlie a very loud, raspy breathing noise when he's not crying or screaming his lungs out.
• The Voiceless: In the present day, Charlie doesn't say anything to Lauren when he meets her, aside from making soft sobbing noises when found in the remains of his house. With C.R, sounds of childlike giggling and sobbing can be heard in his presence, up until C.R aggravates him enough to start chasing him, at which point he switches to feral screeching.

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