Old Marble Hornets Site Bio

Alex Kralie

[Director / Writer / Editor / Actor]

Alex Kralie, born April 4th 1986, has been into making films since his early childhood, when he would make short sketch comedy videos starring himself and his cousins with his parents camcorder. He would then show them at "premieres" to his friends and family. That love has since remained with Alex, where he has been involved in many different capacities in various filmmaking communities. He is a double major in both filmmaking and photography, with a minor in theatre. He originally wrote Marble Hornets during high school and has continuously tweaked and polished it throughout his time at the university. He's very excited to finally see it all happening after years of work!

Likes: Film, Directing, Art, my dog rocky.

Dislikes: Fakery, creative bankruptcy, passionless people, 9 to 5 jobs, unambitiousness, bad movies and film.

Source

Personal Notes

Alex is right up there alongside Brian in the "devastatingly obvious how the Operator's influence warped his character beyond belief" category that drives me absolutely Wild.

Alex is like,,, the footage we see of him from the college years before the Operator really sunk its teeth into everyone is a perfectly encapsulated Tragedy. He was a dedicated little dork who made up in sheer passion what he lacked in skill; the Marble Hornets film project was not going to turn out with a good movie if it had gotten a chance to be finished, it's cheesy and tropey and painfully on the nose, but all of that almost starts to pale in the face of how much Alex cared about it. Alex was a guy who was cheerfully earnest in the way he started filming behind the scenes footage before he even really started filming the movie just because he was that excited to talk about how excited he was; a guy who was dedicated enough to making this film that he sat alone in a room he reserved for auditions for eight solid hours just in the hopes that someone would eventually show up and then lied about it to keep Brian from worrying; who cared enough about the actors he finally was able to get on board to change the scripts he'd been working on for a long time just to make it easier and more comfortable for them to fill their roles.

And even more so than with Brian, you can clearly see the throughline in the way the Operator warped that passion and care. Alex is fully aware of the fact that he's a "Villain"; he knows why he's doing what he's doing and why that's important, but he never has any illusions about what the Actions he's taking are or how they're perceived. Sure, he does some work to undermine his role in things in some of the footage from Season One, but once the cards are on the table, he never really tries to defend his actions so much as he just explains why he's taking them, why he thinks they're important, because at his core, Alex is a character who is convinced that he is sparing everyone a fate worse than death even if they refuse to see it that way.

Like, despite some very popular misconceptions, Alex does not work with the Operator nor does he choose the path he takes because it's what he thinks the Operator wants. Alex is someone who saw his college friends gradually fall to paranoia and incomprehensible illness -- Alex was not the only one affected by the Operator in the college tapes, we can see the illness in the way Jay and Tim both display a variety of physical symptoms like chills and the iconic coughing, and Brian's often conspicuous absence on tapes (even during times when the other characters are filming in his house) speaks to the usual mental/emotional symptoms being present as well. Alex had been suffering for who knows how long under the stress of being stalked by the Operator, experiencing those symptoms himself firsthand, and knowing that other people were on the hook to wind up suffering the exact same way, if not worse.

The Mental Illness allegory is a common lens through which people view this series, and I think one that works relatively well especially for a character like Tim. However, I do think that this lens does something of a disservice to Alex's character if it is the only one through which you are viewing this series. Alex's sense of reality is not distorted in the same way that someone with psychosis has their sense of reality distorted; to be more specific, the Operator is not a delusion or a hallucination that Alex is suffering from, it is a tangible presence in the lives of multiple characters and is exerting a tangible will/influence over them all. Tim was guessing just as much as Alex was guessing when he theorized that his medication was making a difference in the way the Operator influenced him, but none of them (and none of us, frankly) actually understand what the Operator is, how it works, or if there is a way to stop it. After all, the horror of the Operator isn't in the silhouette that it cuts against the background of a camera's shot, it's in the complete and utter incomprehensible unknowable nature of it.

I also think it's interesting how this series is willing to play with the ominous nature of Coincidence, especially with regards to Alex's character. Namely, I think it's extremely interesting that, after everything that happened in college, Alex wound up moving to the Rosswood area when he transferred and went to live with Amy. It's not that I believe there's anything "supernatural" about the location itself -- I think that Tim ran out to Rosswood Park when he was a child because it was simultaneously close enough to reach on foot while still being far enough out from the hospital's campus that it would take them a while to find him again -- but it's still a fascinating fact that Alex wound up running to the exact same place in his post-college attempt to escape the Operator.

Alex doesn't know anything about the hospital or the park's significance to Tim -- although Tim is the one who introduced him to those locations, Tim was very recalcitrant about his childhood connection to them. When Tim offered to take Alex out there, he only said that he knew about them because they're in the area he's from, but it is a very delightful coincidence that this just so happens to be where Amy was going to college. That it just so happens to be where Alex wound up after everything that happened.

It also kind of makes you think: how often did Alex run out to that Park to hide from everyone before shit hit the fan again? The way he talks about and navigates the trails in some of the earlier Season Two entries with Jay makes me think he spent a not-insignificant amount of time there. It feels all too easy to imagine him out there in the middle of the night, just like Tim used to be -- it's one of many parallels in this show that drives me up the wall <3

On a similar thread, the borderline coincidental inception of what is commonly referred to as "the Operator Symbol" is also very interesting to me. Since this symbol is actually frequently used on sidewalks/concrete to mark the placement of pipes/wires/etc., it is a theory of mine that its appearance in Entry #13 is actually the first time Alex sees it and begins associating the mark with the Operator's presence.

It's not that the mark has any kind of supernatural meaning or impact, but that this event was one of -- if not The First -- major face-to-face interaction Alex had with the Operator, and the symbol's coincidental use at the pavilion where he was at the time in conjunction with that significant moment was an association he could never let go of, and that this is what eventually made it Alex's personal shorthand for the Operator as time went on.

It's somewhat a difficult phenomenon to explain, since it's not exactly a Logical thought process -- one of those things where I know what I mean, but I don't know how well anyone else can understand it. I suppose it's similiar to the phenom of "Ideas of Refrences" -- a kind of delusional thinking pattern where you begin reading into things that don't have tangible reason to be read into (a common example is someone thinking that billboards or advertisements on the sides of roads contain hidden messages or warnings). It isn't that Alex deliberately created this symbol himself or that it was supernaturally placed at that location to create a connection for Alex to see, but that Alex just happened to see this mark on some random concrete immediately before the Operator showed up, and after the event was already over, afterwards when he was trying to make sense of what happened, he begins to interpret it as an association/precursor to the Operator's presence because he's scrambling to find Any kind of logic in what just happened and winds up putting the pieces together haphazardly in that confusion -- later justifying this association with the "no face" meaning and the Operator title.

In essence, it reads to me more like a symptom of a pre-existing neurodivergent issue rather than any kind of supernatural title or representation (like, the exact opposite of whatever the "Always Watching" movie thought it was doing with the same mark).

Alex's relationship with the diegetic audience of Marble Hornets is also an interesting one, because he often reads to me as the only one who views them with an air of Concern, which is to say, I think Alex was very aware of Jay's viewers, and I think the idea scared him. Jay and Tim interacted with the audience largely as though they were concerned bystanders -- too distant to have any effect on what was unfolding, but present enough to induce a sense of comfort or obligation. Jay interacted with viewers through Twitter with mild frequency, responding to their messages of concern and sometimes taking or refuting advice that was offered. Tim never really used the twitter, but he did continue uploading videos to the Marble Hornets channel when Jay was incapacitated because he felt a dual obligation to both Jay and the audience. Brian made videos almost exclusively for the other characters involved -- his videos were basically entirely messages to Jay or Tim or Alex with little deviation from that trend over the years.

Alex, though, was very aware of the audience from the very beginning. He knew exactly what kind of a threat they posed -- and what kind of danger they were in -- because during Season One, he was one of them. On a surface level, I think that Alex feared for the audience in a way, because Alex is convinced that the only way to deal with the Operator is to contain the spread of it -- Jay's channel works like a superspreader event; where the Operator had only spread through a contained project group in college, it can now spread to any number of people via the YouTube channel acting as a contagion.

On a deeper level, I think that Alex was afraid of the audience (and, subsequently, afraid of Jay). When Alex contacts Jay at the very end of Season One, and when he talks about doing so at the very beginning of Season Two, he is able to do so because he has been watching the Marble Hornets channel. Through that medium, even with how much Jay attempted to hide his current locations as he moved around out of paranoia, Alex was able to find out what hotel Jay was staying at, which room was his, and deliver the tape directly to him. He knows that any member of the audience who was inclined to do the same could do so, and do so easily. This is exactly why Alex doesn't want Jay to know where he lives -- it isn't necessarily that Alex has 'evidence' of something nefarious there that he doesn't want Jay to find, he doesn't want Jay to film his house and upload footage of it to his YouTube channel. Every time you post a photo of your location online, you put yourself at risk of being doxxed (even if you think you don't have any significant landmarks in the photo, there are some people who can do a lot with very little), and I think Alex was deeply aware of that in a way that no one else really seemed to be.

This is also relevant in Season Three -- even though Alex is no longer having to deal with Jay's constant stalking/filming, it's clear that the events of Season Two took a toll on him. Specifically, the eventual posting of the Season Two footage. By Season Three, Alex is the only character who no longer carries a camera, he is the only character in Season Three who doesn't have any POV footage (even Jessica spends some time with a camera), which means something when he was the first person to begin filming himself 24/7. At some point after the events of Season Two unfolded, Alex decided that the threat of the audience weighed more than the threat of the Operator in this specific circumstance. Part of this is due to the fact that Jay stole and uploaded footage of the Tunnel Incident -- at no point did Alex ever film himself with the intention of sharing anything, but control over the footage was repeatedly taken away from him (both in terms of current footage and previous college tapes, even ones Alex had attempted to destroy entirely). He learns from the mistake and stops filming anything at all.

The other part is due to Jay's influence, specifically, the fact that Jay does film Alex's house and renders the location completely unsafe. When Jay posted Season Two, he made no attempt to disguise his location at all -- he says it outright, he's in an area called Rosswood. With that information and the footage of Alex's house, it wouldn't take an excessive amount of effort for someone to drive around and eventually find exactly where Alex's hosue was located if they were dedicated enough to doing so. Alex can't go home after Jay posted Season Two -- not because he refuses to take care of himself, but because it's no longer safe for him to do so.

It's actually interesting to think about how, even though Alex is responsible for a solid majority of the footage posted as Seasons One and Two, we as an audience never really get a chance to understand his POV. Alex is the one that filmed the footage, but Jay and totheark are the ones who are Telling his story. It almost doesn't even matter if Alex was just as much victim as Tim or Brian during the college years, because Brian and Jay aren't willing to entertain the thoguht, neither is the audience. Alex never really got the benefit of the doubt -- even though Jay shows up in Rosswood to try to 'help', his own suspicion that was fueled in part by totheark's constant uploads gets in the way to the point that he makes things worse more than he ever even attempts to provide any assistance. Every action Alex takes is viewed as "Suspicious" because he was already primed to see Guilt in Alex, and when Jay later speculates on Alex's intentions, the audience believes him without question because Jay is the POV character -- if he's telling us so, then it must be true...

Right?

Also just for fun: Alex carrying his keys like me (ie; Dyke Behavior) mini-compilation <3

Archived Material

Deadpan Snarker: Alex has shades of this.

#42:: -Jay: I thought I'd take a look around while I was waiting. I got kind of lost, I guess.; - Alex: You got lost in woods you've never been in?
#46:: - "Hey Jay, you forgot your flashlight."
#51:: -Alex: Okay rolling.; - Brian starts coughing up a fit.; -Alex: Good take.
#52:: -Alex: When I gave you those tapes, I told you never to mention them again. I thought that implied not sharing them with the world!
#54:: -Alex, Tim and Brian are discussing the Marble Hornets film when the power goes out.; -Tim: Is it going to be, like, dark?; -Alex: There's going to be significantly more lighting.

(X)

Do Wrong, Right: In Entry #46, Alex seems less concerned that Jay broke into his apartment than the fact that he did it so incompetently: he did it while Alex was taking out the trash, giving himself at most a minute or two to do whatever he wanted to do. (X)

At the end of season 1, Jay's apartment is burnt down. It's heavily implied to be the work of Masky at the time, but towards the end of season 3, Alex burns Tim's house down in an attempt to kill him, heavily implying that it was actually him trying to kill Jay as early as the first season. (X)

Alex is either dangerously insane or consciously villainous. Alternatively, his hands are tied and is being forced to kill people by the Operator. It's hard to tell which. (X)

Unreliable Narrator: Alex's confrontational outbursts, erratic behavior, and inability to explain why his judgment should be trusted doesn't help others feel good about him. As we learn in season 2, these doubts are well founded (X)

I’m so soft for pre-operator Alex in Entry 20. He was such a good friend and doting on Tim when he started coughing. Messing around with the painting cause it looked nice, the little hop he does when he sat on the couch after Tim got up. I love him so much holy heck man (X)

i love Alex Kralie the tortured, self-hating soul who squats in burned out buildings with phantom blood on his hands knowing in those cold-bright moments of clarity that what he is doing is wrong wrong wrong but if he says it to himself often enough he almost starts to convince himself that those instincts are wrong and that he is doing The Right Thing (X)

Alex probably had fantastic college nights where he and his friends would get drunk and watch silly bad movies and play video games until 4 in the morning and laugh and share these incredible human moments together except now he’s alone and he killed them all and it really hurts to think about because whatever Alex is now he was human once (X)

I think a lot about how like. Alex Kralie was just a fucking film student. That dude was just working on a film project for class and was faced with supernatural horrors beyond his comprehension. He was getting fucking stalked by slenderman and then he just had to like go to his film class the next day and sit there while the teacher asked him how his film was coming along and he had to just smile and nod. Do you think his professor ever looked over his shoulder while he was editing footage and spotted the operator and was just like 'Oh! That's neat! Are you working on a horror film? What effects did you use to make that thing??' While Alex sat there horrified. Do you think he ever accidentally showed his teacher some of his more 'personal' footage during a check in and had to be like 'haha sorry that wasn't supposed to be in there!' Do you think people at the school outside of the crew were worried about him? Do you think that thing spread further into the university than he realized? (X)

u ever think about how Alex must’ve felt seeing Brian after he escapes the Ark the first time? like he probably thought he succeeded in killing him once the operator made him vanish. but then the friend he killed is there in front of him Again, alive and even sicker than before. instead of ending his suffering he made it Worse. i think he would’ve felt sick to his stomach. his “mercy killing” failed and now Brian is running around in the woods, brain scrambled with codes and out to kill him. the guy who was kind and goofy n bright is now broken n angry n paranoid and Alex did that to him. made him that way. he’s come back Different and Worse and way sicker than before and all Alex had done was make everything worse. in the end there was no mercy or good in what he did to Brian and i think part of Alex had to be aware of that. n it probably ate at him. (X)