Internet Horror: Marble Hornets
In the small but crowded realm of Youtube horror projects, nothing compares to Marble Hornets.
A brief history lesson: once upon a time there was a thread on the Something Awful forums that gave rise to internet creepypasta sensation Slenderman (maybe you’ve heard of him). For a while old slendie positively gripped the internet, and then the whole thing got played out and two girls stabbed their friend as part of a Slenderman-inspired delusion, signalling the final death knell of the phenomenon.
Of the many Slenderman creative projects that popped up during his reign of terror, Marble Hornets is probably the most famous. It set the standard and the tone for the initial wave of Slenderman creations, codified several long-standing tropes and ideas regarding how the character operates and interacts with his victims, and arguably did more to propel the whole thing into the mainstream than Slenderman’s actual creator.
Marble Hornets was created by a trio of young friends, whose creative endeavours fell apart in 2016 amidst hilarious drama. But before that they put out three seasons of the show on Youtube, bringing the story to a definitive conclusion--something of a rarity among Slenderman projects, which overwhelmingly tended to fizzle out as its college-aged creators graduated and got too busy to maintain them.
But how good is it, really? And does it still hold up in a post-Slenderman world? Let’s find out.
The setup of Marble Hornets is pretty simple: our protagonist Jay was once a cameraman on his friend Alex Kralie’s terrible student movie, the titular Marble Hornets (there’s no particular reason it’s called that, in case you’re wondering). That project was never completed due to Alex’s increasingly erratic behaviour, which culminated in him almost burning all of the footage. Jay managed to convince Alex to give him the tapes instead, which Alex agreed to on the condition that Jay never speak to him about it again.
After some time, Jay gets around to watching them and makes several disturbing discoveries. The Marble Hornets footage, in addition to documenting Alex’s increasingly troubled behaviour on set, also includes several eerie encounters with a tall, faceless being in a suit--encounters which Jay as the camerman had to have been present for, but which he has no recollection of. In addition, it seems that Alex had started filming himself constantly in the apparent belief that this would keep the terrifying entity at bay, and that footage reveals his mental state to have been far worse than his friends and collaborators were aware of at the time.
Simultaneously disturbed and curious, Jay embarks on an investigation, combing through the gigantic tape pile for clues while also trying to track down Alex and the other Marble Hornets crew members. But it quickly becomes apparent that in doing so he’s attracted the attention of several malevolent beings: an online interlocutor named ToTheArk who communicates with him in creepy videos and codes, a masked knife-wielding assailant with apparently supernatural powers, and worst of all “The Operator” as the Marble Hornets version of Slenderman is known. The deeper he investigates, the more Jay attracts the Operator’s baleful influence, and pretty soon he’s manifesting symptoms of paranoia similar to Alex’s.
In terms of format, this is occupying a well-worn niche; the epistolary horror story is an old tradition, and by the time Marble Hornets started “protagonist gets a cache of tapes/diaries/drawings/etc with creepy shit in them” had already become the go-to way to do an online Slendie story, probably because it was relatively easy for zero-budget bedroom creators to pull off on their blog or Youtube channel (indeed, this remains a popular format for Youtube horror to this day, although it may have been eclipsed by the equally budget-friendly “oh no my Vlog series has been interrupted by ghosts” style).
Also similar to many of the first wave of Slenderman media, Marble Hornets incorporated ARG elements of audience participation and cross-media storytelling: ToTheArk’s videos contained codes for the fan community to solve in order to “assist” Jay with his investigation, and the characters’ twitter accounts were a supplemental part of the plot. This is obviously the sort of experience that it’s impossible to truly recreate after the fact, although as far as I know all of the Twitter accounts and other ancillary material is still online, and it’s all included in the Blu Ray release so you can get a taste of what being an active participant in Marble Hornets during its release was like.
Again, at around this time and in the immediate aftermath of Marble Hornet’s release the internet was full of stories more or less exactly like this. What sets Marble Hornets above the crowd is its execution.
Right from the first frame of the first episode, the series establishes an eerie, tense atmosphere that flags at times--especially in seasons two and three--but never completely abates. There’s a constant sense of low-key dread, the feeling that something is always lurking just off-screen. When that turns out to actually be the case--such as when The Operator makes an appearance or the creepy masked figure shows up--the series becomes genuinely bone-chilling.
The series uses its low-budget, low-tech nature to the fullest effect, using blown-out audio and other simple editing tricks to incite terror in the absence of more advanced CGI. This is very much one of those “the shark from Jaws looked terrible so they put it on-screen as little as possible” situations where a piece of film-making turns an apparent weakness into a strength...albeit with the caveat that the few times they do unambiguously show The Operator close-up and in full light, he’s a little too janky to take seriously.
Speaking of The Operator, I’ve repeatedly expressed the opinion that horror stories are better off not trying to explain the horror too much, and Marble Hornets is a rare positive illustration of this principle. While other mysteries like the identity of ToTheArk or the connection between the present events and one of the main characters’ past are answered in due time, The Operator itself remains a total enigma: you never find out what it is, where it came from, or what it wants. As far as the characters and the audience know, it’s just this completely inexplicable entity that haunts people entirely at random. Even the exact parameters of its powers and how they can be mitigated remain fuzzy; the characters come up with various interpretations, some of which appear to have some truth to them, but even that’s left ambiguous by the series’ ending.
I have no qualms about declaring the first season of Marble Hornets something akin to a horror masterpiece, as long as the inherent limitations of the circumstances of its creation are kept in mind. Watching the series for the first time--or even the second or third time--feels like a descent into an altered state of mind, as though you’re accompanying the characters on their journey into the paranoid world of The Operator. The raw, unrefined nature just makes this atmosphere more potent; much like The Blair Witch Project, it’s easy to slip into the mindset that these are real events happening to real people, even though you know they’re not.
Things start to get shakier in seasons two and three.
Whereas the first season seems to have been conceived as a one-and-done and could stand on its own pretty well, the other two seasons have an over-arching plot that’s more ambitious and complex. This has a number of side effects.
For one, it seems that the three creators were having more trouble getting episodes out the door, no doubt because of the added complications of filming in more varied locations than their own apartments and/or the woods behind their apartments, working with a hired actress, and getting fancier with the props and set decoration.
The thing about this kind of ARG-esque continuous story is that you can’t just take a break between episodes if you’re behind schedule; the viewers are supposed to be following a real-time narrative of ongoing events, so if there’s a sudden three-month long break in episodes then you have to explain what the characters were doing during that time. The desire to avoid this situation probably contributed to the sudden profusion of pointless filler episodes where one of the characters wanders around in a park for five minutes and then gets briefly spooked by the Operator. The first season wasn’t exactly lean, but seasons two and three have much more wasted space.
The other big problem with a more ambitious plot is that it comes with a more ambitious script, which in turn means that the three lead creators have to give more ambitious performances. Apart from clips of Alex’s Marble Hornets student film that are supposed to be bad, the first season has almost nothing in the way of actual acting, in terms of two or more characters in a scene delivering dialogue at each other; the second and third seasons are much heavier on that front, along with dramatic confrontations, devastating revelations of childhood trauma and a surprising number of fight scenes. The results are...mixed.
Tim Sutton is the best by far; his character has the heaviest dramatic burden and he actually pulls it off surprisingly well. Troy Wagner as Jay comes in second, largely because Jay is a low-key guy who’s usually not on screen. The weak link is Joseph DeLage as Alex, who becomes the antagonist in the second and third season and is therefore supposed to seem like a credible threat. I don’t think DeLage would ever have had the right look for this kind of role to begin with, but his performance is also completely unconvincing in nearly every scene he’s in. The lead actor’s weaknesses stand out all the more due to the brief inclusion of a professional actress hired to play a side character, who is noticeably better than any of the main trio during her scenes.
This comes close to being a critical flaw in the third season, because a sense of verisimilitude is crucial to a project like this and it all starts to fall apart when you can’t ignore the fact that you’re actually watching three friends awkwardly yell dialogue at each other in an abandoned building. But it never quite tips the series over the edge, even in the third season when you add the mediocre acting to the meandering pacing. There’s a chemical reaction at the heart of Marble Hornets that just about keeps it animated until it crosses the finish line.
Ultimately, Marble Hornets stands as aneat summation of the entire Slenderman phenomenon: propelled at the beginning by the excitement of its premise, before rapidly dwindling in quality as the audience (and, one suspects, the creators as well) got tired of the whole thing. The first season of the series is the undisputed high watermark of Slenderman media, and I’d recommend it to anyone looking for lo-fi spooks to get spooped by.