Featureless faces: a film aesthetics

The paper explores a particular type of degenerate face, that is, one that is empty, with no elements inside, reduced to a vacant surface. The analysis first focuses on the phenomenon of Slender Man, a fictitious character born as an online urban legend – starting from a so-called creepypasta – and which has become an icon of a digital imagery so powerful as to generate a myriad of textualities and also culminate in the production of movies. The study of Slender Man, whose face/non-face constitutes its most peculiar trait, will allow us to investigate the value of the face in the context of viral and memetic communication. Slender Man’s face is, for all intents and purposes, nullified, yet it encapsulates a disparate set of meanings. Starting from this case study, a specific theory of the extreme limit of the face intended as an empty surface will be outlined, comparing Slender Man with other similar figures both in the literary field, such as Marcel Schwob’s Sans-gueules, and in the audiovisual and cinematographic fields, developing a first filmography of featureless faces in films, with the aim of highlighting how just as there are cultures of the face, at the same time there are significant cultures of the non-face.