"Before you had angels and
succubi, and then ghosts and spirits, today we have shadow people and
inter-dimensional beings. The Slender Man, and other newly created
entities, are just the newest addition in the progression of a long,
and very real, human tradition. You’ve seen him, now you can’t
unsee him."
- Victor Surge, creator of the Slender
Man
Marble Hornets is a TV series and alternate reality game that began on YouTube in 2009. There are currently two complete series.
Film student Jay is trying to piece
together what happened to his friend Alex, who started acting
strangely three years ago and then disappeared. He goes through a box
of tapes Alex gave him the last time they met, and soon discovers
that something peculiar was going on with his friend: Alex had been
filming himself constantly for months, and it seems to have something
to do with the gaunt, faceless figure that's lurking in the
background of some of the videos.
Yes, it's Slender Man: The YouTube
Series. The Slender Man is an internet-generation bogeyman that first
appeared on SomethingAwful.com, and for something that's little more
than a name and an idea, has spawned a pretty impressive amount of
artwork, fiction, Photoshops and even an appearance in Minecraft. There seems to be something about him that resonates with people:
somehow it's the lack of specifics, the absence of a backstory, a
motive, or even any concrete acts of villainy, that makes him all the
more compelling. He's just there - a creepy, long-limbed guy who
appears in hard-to-spot places, and whatever he bodes, it's not good.
The story of Marble Hornets unfolds as
Jay uploads a series of entries to YouTube to "make sense of
what's happening" (herpy and derpy, yes, but not really any more
so than The Blair Witch Project's "It's all I have left!")
As he comes to realise that there's more going on than he
bargained for - more people disappear, he's attacked by masked figures, and those who worked on Marble Hornets are strangely unwilling to talk about it - another YouTube user called totheark begins posting
cryptic and vaguely menacing responses to his videos. Is totheark
warning him away, or leading him to the truth about Alex and the
Slendy?
Marble Hornets is uneven, badly acted,
pretentious in parts, and very, very good. As the entries are often out of order chronologically, it's not always clear what each one is adding to the story until you rewatch them in the context of what you've learned. Like a demonic Where's
Wally, the Slender Man could be in any scene, forcing you to scan the
background of every shot for the long-shanked antagonist - creating a
game of see-him-before-he-sees-you that soon gets unnerving.
If this was the only gimmick, the
series would have pretty short legs, but creators Troy Wagner and
Joseph DeLage keep you intrigued by maintaining an internal logic to the proceedings, while
coyly refusing to reveal what the chuff is going on. There are codes
to be decoded in totheark's videos; patterns in the behaviour of the
Slender Man and those who encounter him, recurring motifs like woodland and cameras - none
of it makes sense yet, but it feels like the clues are
there.
While it'll probably be compared with
The Blair Witch Project, Marble Hornets has more in common with Koji
Shiraishi's excellent Noroi. It has the trappings of a paranormal
procedural and strange, possibly unreliable characters, underpinned
by a gradually escalating sense of dread as they continue to learn nothing that could help them.
At the time of writing, the
third and final season is about to kick off - how it resolves the
many questions the series has raised so far will be the real test of
whether Marble Hornets is a quiet bit of horror brilliance, or a meme
that's gotten out of hand.
