What is up with the Tentacles?
Tentacles as a trope in western horror can be traced back at least as far as the earliest short stories of M. R. James, collected in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary in 1904:
"I was conscious of a most horrible smell of mould, and of a cold kind of face pressed against my own, and moving slowly over it, and of several—I don't know how many—legs or arms or tentacles or something clinging to my body. I screamed out, Brown says, like a beast,
The human body has four limbs that each bend at a single joint. Excessive and unjointed limbs are a reliable way to communicate inhuman alienness.
Tentacles or additional limbs are present in three distinct forms in Eric Knudsen's original Slender Man photos.
Form A Arms subdivided into fluid finger-like tendrils
Form B Multiple articulated arms reminiscent of a ??????
Form # Tentacles extended and supporting the
These forms eventually collapsed into the most common depiction, a man with tentacles a man with tentacles emerging from the back:
But another common motif, also inspired by the original photos, is Slender Man as horror:)
