Best of the Web – Marble Hornets

(Best of the Web is an occasional series of posts looking at what I believe is the World Wide Web being used to its absolute best)


Marble Hornets – an ongoing video series on YouTube that follows the mythos of The Slender Man.  If you’re not familiar with this meme character follow the link and get a feel for it.  

In simplest form the story of “Marble Hornets” is this – a young man named Jay follows up on an unfinished video project of his college friend Alex.  The project is called “Marble Hornets”.  Alex worked on the project for a couple months then stopped and withdrew from the world.  Jay convinces Alex to give him the tapes.  Alex does but asks that Jay never mention them to him again.  Alex then leaves his previous life behind.  What Jay discovers in those tapes is puzzling.  When strange events begin to happen all around him Jay is drawn deeper into a strange and frightening world.  In that world he will confront the terrifying entity known only as “The Operator”.


Done on virtually no budget and with the most basic equipment by creator Troy Wagner and director Joseph DeLage the resulting series has aspects of the “Blair Witch Project”, “The Twilight Zone”, “The X-Files” and “Twin Peaks”.  The webseries has a creepy feeling of reality to that makes it all the scarier.  Like many of the nominees in my “Best of the Web” series this began as just a lark for the creators.  By the end of the first season (26 episodes) the series had developed a serious following and been praised by critic Roger Ebert.  Now into its third season the concept has been turned into a motion picture (release date still unknown).


This is some creepy, scary stuff.  I’m not normally a big fan of horror films or books.  “Marble Hornets” does an amazing job with minimal resources (the first 26 episodes were shot on a total budget of around $500).  The story telling has a wonderful complexity to it.  If you get into it you’ll want to mark the companion YouTube channel totheark.  Do NOT start with totheark.  It barely makes sense in the context of the larger story, it makes none on its own.


The first two seasons are now available on DVD, season 3 is ongoing as of this writing on YouTube.


Here’s the real bottom line – if you love scary stuff and you love seeing what can be done with great imagination, you won’t want to miss “Marble Hornets”.