Marble Hornets is an alternate reality game 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. The channel revolves around Jay Merrick (played by Wagner), who is attempting to unravel the events that caused his friend Alex Kraile's student movie to be cancelled mid-production.
I grew up with Creepypasta, so I was aware of Marble Hornets pretty much from 2013 onwards, but I never actually watched it until 2021, just before I moved for university. As a kid, my attention span (and undiagnosed ADHD) was nowhere near enough to sit through it, but as an adult I absolutely fell in love with it - the nostalgia for my Creepypasta days, the late 2000s, and my love of ARGS pretty much all combined to make Marble Hornets one of my biggest interests!
I absolutely adore this series so much - in fact, I first watched it all the way through while home alone at night in a very old house, which was the perfect vibe even though I came out of it extremely jumpy at all the creaky pipes and stuff in the house! It is very long, so if you haven't seen it but don't have tens of hours to go through the whole two channels worth of content, I'd 100% recommend Night Mind's series on it, which happen to be his very first videos in general! He doesn't just go through the videos, but also the Twitter account linked to the series, so it helps fill in some of the timeline of the story.
A huge part of my love for this webseries is nostalgia, if I'm honest - looking back, it's far from the most technologically impressive for an ARG, and the acting can be more funny than convincing sometimes, but I genuinely think it holds up! There are some shots that are genuinely super striking, and some moments that genuinely give me chills among the 2000s/early 2010s vibes. Something about some of the shots are so cinematically beautiful too, especially near the end (the shot of Tim after his confrontation with Alex and the Operator on the stairs comes to mind!)
favourite characters
- Tim Wright / Masky: Okay, I am basically in love with Tim, I'll be honest. He's such a tragic character, while also being one of the most hopeful ones in the series, and tbh I just want to give him a big hug and tell him everything's gonna be okay (or not, if you've seen the series, but I can dream!)
- Brian Thomas / Hoodie: I just think he's neat, he kind of reminds me of a smug cat and the Hoodie sightings in the show are some of the coolest parts of the series visually. If there's one thing the real Brian can do well, it's play a mysterious yet still cool character, even though the Hoodie mask looks kind of goofy in some shots.
Yeah, it's probably a bit predictable that the Creepypasta kid's favourites are the characters that were adopted into the Creepypasta fandom, but that's okay with me! They just have a special place in my heart. ♥