Marble Hornets

Marble Hornets (abbreviated "MH") is a YouTube web series inspired by the Slender Man online mythos. The first video was posted on YouTube on June 20, 2009, following a post that its creator, Troy Wagner, created on the Something Awful forum the previous day. It was one of the first webseries to be created around the character, with the first episode premiering exactly 10 days since the appearance of the original images of Slender Man on the Something Awful forums.
To date, there are 92 videos on the main channel (87 entries). The series also has 39 accompanying videos from a side-channel, "Totheark". These videos, as well as the eponymous "Totheark", have been featured multiple times throughout the story. As of June 16, 2019, the principal channel has over 100 million views.
On August 3, 2015, a follow-up series titled Clear Lakes 44 was uploaded onto the "Marble Hornets" channel. As of April 2016, Clear Lakes 44 was cancelled after the members of the creative team went their separate ways, as confirmed by Wagner. On October 16, 2016, a successor to "Clear Lakes 44", titled ECKVA, was launched. On December 27, 2017, Wagner posted a new photo to his Twitter page, teasing a comic related to "Marble Hornets" slated for a 2018 release. The first issue released on February 26, 2019, with a total of five being slated for the series.
In 2015, a film spinoff "" was released. Critical reception was overwhelmingly negative.
Plot.
The series follows Jay Merrick (Troy Wagner), a young man who attempts to find out what happened during the filming of "Marble Hornets", an unfinished student film helmed by Jay's friend, Alex Kralie (Joseph DeLage). Three years before, Alex abruptly ended the project after only three months of production. Before cutting contact with Jay, Alex gave him the tapes containing raw footage from the film and told Jay never to talk about it with him again.
By watching the tapes, Jay discovers that the filming seemed to be hampered by a figure known as "The Operator" who constantly stalked Alex no matter what time and place, whether on set with his actors, walking his dog to the park, or at his own home. Alex‘s physical and mental state became affected by The Operator such as Alex having severe coughing fits, severe paranoia to the point of affecting his personality making him more stressed, irritable, and aggressive towards cast members Tim Wright (Tim Sutton) and Sarah (Mary Kathleen Bishop) and cameraman Seth (Seth Wilson), and buying tons of tapes to film himself in order to catch footage of The Operator on camera. Along with this, Jay also finds that the tapes have extremely bad audio and visual problems such as audio distortion, visual distortion, static, inaudible audio at times, missing footage, and no audio. Most of these are assumed to be The Operator‘s doing. Jay does speculate that some of these problems might be Alex’s doing instead. The Operator soon begins invading Jay's personal life, inducing him to set up cameras in his apartment. Posting the tapes to YouTube as "Entries" also nets Jay cryptic and threatening responses from a user known as "Totheark".
Jay's investigation leads him to meet with Tim and sends him to the abandoned house of another cast member, Brian Thomas (Brian Haight) where Jay finds the house trashed and finds several important things there such as a bullet casing, a pill bottle, a bunch of Alex’s drawings, a water bottle in a closet door along with blanket, and a trail of blood upstairs that leads to the bathroom where Jay finds dry blood in the sink, and that the lights don’t work. Throughout his visit, Jay hears many strange noises and briefly has a severe coughing fit. Jay decides to take the stuff he found. Totheark then responds to Jay with a video revealing they were the ones making the strange noises and were watching Jay the whole time. Jay then uploads footage of he, Alex, and Tim doing a scene together while The Operator was standing outside watching them through the window. Jay then notes that he is disturbed by the footage since he has no memory of it ever happening. Jay then decides to go back to Brian‘s house in case he missed something important, where he has his first encounter with a masked figure who tackles Jay before having a seizure and then Jay waking up the next day with the knife he brought with him gone.
Jay then uploads the next entry revealing that like Alex, he himself had been filming himself for a while but found nothing important and recorded it to a hard drive until he found footage of the masked figure watching him sleeping before Jay disappears for two hours. Totheark then responds to Jay with a video showing where Jay was during those past two hours. Jay then uploads the next entry where he analyzes all of the stuff he found during his first visit at Brian’s house. He finds that the pill bottle is empty and has had its label torn off even though he didn’t find it like that. He also finds that bullet casing he had is missing. Jay suspects that Totheark is behind this. Jay then looks through Alex’s drawings and finds a message telling him to go to a tower. Jay visits a red tower to find a tape that shows Alex leaving Seth in an abandoned building when confronted with The Operator, with Alex subsequently determining that all of the cast and crew of "Marble Hornets" are "gone". Eventually, threats of stalking from Totheark causes Jay to flee his apartment, which is subsequently burned down. Jay receives video in the mail of Alex and his girlfriend, Amy Walters (Bethann Williams), being attacked by The Operator. As a result, Jay sets out to find Alex.
Seven months later, an amnesiac Jay wakes up in a hotel room and meets with a similarly amnesiac young woman, Jessica Locke (Jessica May), who subsequently disappears. He unlocks a safe in his hotel room containing videos and a hard drive revealing the events that transpired during the previous seven months.
The footage shows that, during the missing seven months, Jay had a run-in with Alex, which saw them forming an alliance to find Amy. Jay also learned that the masked figure was Tim. Having been driven insane by the terror of The Operator and suspicious of Jay spying on him, Alex killed a stranger whose body was then taken by The Operator. The videos also reveal that a hooded figure has started following Jay, and that Jessica was Amy's friend and roommate, who, when contacted by Jay in his investigation, was unintentionally dragged into the case. When Alex attempted to kill Jay and Jessica for their involvement, the two escaped with the help of Tim and booked rooms at the aforementioned hotel, where an attack by the Operator caused the damage to their memories.
With no leads in finding either Alex or Jessica, Jay enlists Tim under the pretense of finishing "Marble Hornets". While Tim is initially furious upon learning about Jay's true motives, he decides to continue assisting him after the hooded figure steals his medication from his home, causing him to have a psychological breakdown. It is revealed that Tim does not remember anything he has done while in his "masked" state, that he was formerly committed to a mental hospital due to hallucinations that he fears were caused by The Operator, and that his new medication is able to block him from switching to his "masked" state. Tim and Jay's investigation leads them to repeatedly encounter The Operator, who subjects them both to physical and psychological torment. Jay begins to experience hallucinations as a result of this frequent exposure.
Tim is revealed to have hidden a video showing that he (in his masked state) and the hooded figure are the ones responsible for Jessica's disappearance and subsequent encounter with Alex and The Operator, with this revelation causing a breakdown in Jay and Tim's working relationship. Jay shows up at Tim's house with a knife and zip-ties, but he is overpowered and tied up by Tim, before later being freed by the hooded figure. Tim and Jay set off to find Alex separately. Jay is later shot and killed by Alex, leading Tim to take over the "Marble Hornets" channel. A confrontation between Tim and the hooded figure leads to the hooded figure falling to his death, after which Tim discovers that the hooded figure was Brian.
Tim, realizing that Alex intends to kill him, attempts to lure Alex to his home, with the consequence of the house being burned to the ground by Alex. During Tim's final confrontation with Alex, Alex reveals that he wants to kill anyone who has encountered The Operator, as he believes this will prevent the spread of The Operator's influence, and that he has already killed Amy, Sarah, and Seth in addition to Jay, knows that Brian is dead, and believes that Jessica is also dead. This means that Alex and Tim are the only remaining survivors of the recording of "Marble Hornets", and that Tim is therefore Alex's last remaining target, after which he intends to kill himself. In the ensuing struggle, Tim finally manages to kill Alex by stabbing him multiple times in the throat. Alex's final words to Tim are that if he knows of any others who have come into contact with the Operator, then he should kill them and then kill himself as Alex had intended to do.
Four days later, Tim disposes of his mask and reunites with Jessica, who had survived the events of the hotel, despite Alex having thought otherwise. Tim had kept hidden before this point in order to protect her from any further danger. Tim's final encounter with Jessica ends ambiguously; Tim lapses into a coughing fit as the camera distorts and then cuts to black. When the footage resumes, Tim is alone, driving away and stopping at an intersection while sirens can be heard in the distance. The final image of the series is a text card that simply states: "Everything is fine". It is therefore not known whether or not Tim had acted on Alex's final words following the affect of The Operator and killed Jessica while planning his own suicide, or if the medication taken by both Tim and now Jessica had allowed them to overcome The Operator and survive.
Development and reception.
Wagner and DeLage began working on the webseries after reading about the Slender Man mythos and because both liked the ease of creating a YouTube series. The initial budget for the series was about $500, which the two used to create the first 26 episodes. They decided against making a set time for each entry, as they both determined that the characters filming the entries would not consider the length of the episode and that the random entry times would help add to the realism. The entire series is edited with the software Sony Vegas Pro and Adobe Premiere.
After its release the series' popularity grew, drawing comparisons to "Lonelygirl15" and "Connect with I". In 2013, "Dread Central" named "Marble Hornets" one of their "Top 10 Horror Fan Films", noting that while it "isn’t technically a film" it still contained an "interwoven examination of the mythical Slender Man" and that they felt it was "what quality fanfare and found footage is really all about." Early during the airing of season 1, the series received praise from Roger Ebert.
In May 2014, the developers launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for the DVD release of the third season. The response was overwhelmingly positive, with the original goal of $8000 in donations being exceeded by $76,271. These funds went towards further projects, including a box set and new supplementary material in the form of scenes from Alex Kralie's "Marble Hornets".
Film adaptation.
In February 2013, "Variety" announced that plans were underway to produce a film adaptation of "Marble Hornets". They also announced that the script would be written by Ian Shorr, that James Moran would direct, and that Doug Jones would be portraying the Operator in the film. In October of the same year, Wagner announced on his blog that the movie had finished filming and it would not be a continuation of the YouTube series but would be set within the same universe.
The film, titled "", was released on video on demand on April 7, 2015, starring Doug Jones, Alexandra Breckenridge, and Alexandra Holden. The film opened in select theaters on May 15, 2015. Critical reception for "Always Watching" was predominantly negative.