Technical Aspects
This section is for notes on the technical and storytelling aspects of the Marble Hornets ARG. Narratives, soundscapes, camera glitches, and more.
Audio/Visual
marble hornets is a fantastic example of how to use non-diegetic sounds in horror but also non-diegetic visuals. more or less, the characters can't see or hear the audio-visual distortion as its happening. it will only appear on the tapes after they are viewed and uploaded, which means the heavy distortion and visual tears don't give any warning to the characters, but every warning to the viewer that danger is imminent. (X)
On his way to the red tower in Season 1, Jay briefly flashes his camera over a hole and a bit of static is heard. It's a blink-and-you-miss-it moment. Over 40 entries and three-and-a-half years later, when Jay and Tim return to check it out, they find burned tapes in the hole, showing Alex did burn some of them before Jay intervened. (X)
Sensory Abuse: Some of the audio distortion can be very merciless on the ears, especially if it comes without warning. The moment in Entry #76 when there's a high-pitched ringing sound that fades in out of nowhere before Jessica turns around and runs into the Operator comes to mind. (X)
Narratives and Storytelling
Joseph on the Ending of MH:
To get really lame about it, Marble Hornets is and has never been about the answers. It has been about flawed characters looking for answers and ultimately failing because they were dealing with something completely beyond their understanding. Who would give the answers to them? It would just be conjecture by the narrators and conjecture that, given the circumstances, wouldn’t seem important to them.
I feel like a lot of people that are mad about not getting everything explained to them are too used to typical storytelling from TV (not a bad thing! I love my Netflix account) but I don’t think anyone would look at Marble Hornets and say it fits into any standard. That isn’t to say that we wrote a perfect story. There are many flaws in Marble Hornets and it was a big learning experience for all of us. This was our first shot at a big story and it was one that was never supposed to go on this long in the first place (the original plan was for the first season to be the end). (X)
Kudzu Plot: Answers accrue at a rate of one or two per season. Questions, at a rate of three or four per entry. (X)
Horror and Vibes
marble hornets is like. being watched. being hunted. becoming the hunter. becoming the watcher. being consumed by fear until you become the thing to be feared. decaying places. ghost towns. loving people the wrong way. guilt. guilt-as-anger. anger-as-love. is it better to kill for mercy or justice. are silent observers more or less guilty than the thing doing the killing. film students are fucking insane. and i eat that shit up every time (X)
Tbh the most painful thing about Marble Hornets is being reminded that they were all just college students goofing around making a bad student film and then That happened (X)
Genre Deconstruction: Marble Hornets deconstructs its own Alternate Reality Game format by showing what happens when its primary subjects find out their activities are being shown to the entire world. This causes nothing but trouble for Jay. (X)
Jigsaw Puzzle Plot: As told by an Unreliable Narrator. The story is comprised of clips Jay edits and uploads while looking through a mass of largely unlabelled tapes, some of which have been tampered with, some of them featuring Jay himself in situations he has no memory of. Sometimes someone will log into his YouTube account and upload clips in his name, and a couple of times he's revealed that he hasn't been telling us the whole story... Much of the timeline for the season 1 tapes can only be guessed at, and as of #53 it's still unclear when entry #37 took place. Later lampshaded when it's pointed out that Jay just points his camera at random stuff and finds things out almost completely by accident. (X)
On a meta level, every video under the Marble Hornets account has its comments disabled, leaving you without immediate insight into what other viewers are thinking or feeling and removing the possibility of a comical comment relieving the fear of the video. (X)
The ‘Villain’
i know the other slenderverse series’ out there are often more complex, have more supernatural and just full-out wack concepts like reiteration and separate timelines, and i really do appreciate it. but when rewatching marble hornets, i forgot just how simple it is in comparison. there’s just the operator, alex, some guys in masks, and cryptic videos. and something about that feels scarier to me. it could happen to anyone. it’s not because it ran in your family on your moms side. it’s not because you’re a chosen group of kids that have been reborn time and time again. it’s just because you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
it’s added onto the fact that marble hornets doesn’t really have a… villain. sure, you could say alex, but is he really alex? or is he taken over by the operator? and if he isn’t, and he truly is just trying to save his friends and others in his own fucked up way, can we really call him a true villain? and totheark clearly isn’t a villain. neither is tim, or brian. none of them are purely good, but none of them are really evil either. they’re all in different shades of grey. they’re real people who do stupid shit because anybody in that situation would.
the only thing you could make a case for is the operator, but i hesitate to call it a villain either. the operator is a force of nature. yes, it will dispose of you, it will take you, it will control you… but there’s a sense of “no hard feelings” always present. it doesn’t know you, or care about you, it’s just existing as it always has, doing what it always will, and while we can’t understand or stop it, we can’t really put an alignment on something we can’t even comprehend.
unlike other series’ where it comes to you because of your extraordinary circumstances, or because it wants something from you (see: tribetwelve), in the case of marble hornets they have gotten caught in it’s web. the characters dug too far and brought themselves into the mess, not the other way around, with the only exception being tim- and even then, we don’t know anything about why it latched to tim first, except that it just… did.
furthermore, the operator just feels like a plot device in a lot of cases. it’s not that important other than it’s an influence on the characters, not an actual antagonist. it doesn’t attack, it gets alex to attack and take whatever is left, like a vulture. totheark, the masked man and the hooded man, they really steal the show along with alex. it barely even feels like a slenderseries at all and it’s really special in it’s own right.
besides the operator, there is no supernatural. totheark seems similar at first glance to any other shadowy video makers that mock and berate the protagonists, but at the end of the day, they are just humans who are in the same trap as everyone else, and this is their way of dealing with it. of trying to stop it.
marble hornets isn’t about the operator. marble hornets is about a former group of acquaintances dealing with something that can’t be dealt with, the people they talk to, and what ways they come up with to stop it. all of it. the good. the bad. and everything in-between. and that’s scary as hell.
SOURCE: Account deactivated.
Humanoid Abomination: The Operator is a great example of this trope. Bizarre powers, warps reality just by being present, drives people to madness, and has incomprehensible goals that just happen to incidentally wreak havoc on human lives. (X)