if you guessed any of those things dear reader, you are WRONG. the most important thing from 2009 was slender man. yes, from the video game. yes, from the creepiest event ever to come out wisconsin. but more important: from 2009!
slender man emerged from a somethingawful thread in 2009 and i’d love to talk about that some time but right now i’m going to focus on the first big Slender Man Thing: Marble Hornets. Like most slender man things, Marble Hornets is hard to formally classify. it’s not a movie, though it mostly exists as videos. it’s been called an ARG, but there’s no real ‘game’ element. the closest that acronym gets is at Reality: marble hornets has a lot to do with reality.
in this way marble hornets shares a lot with lovecraft: in this story, something is wrong with what is real. something else marble hornets shares with lovecraft? it can really suck sometimes. it’s in that strange category of unintentional artwork where the creator(s) didn’t really know what they were making - and the result is something strangely expressive, unhindered by flaws or form, and more or less irreplicable. (it follows that when i’m talking about marble hornets, i’m talking about “Introduction” through “Entry #26.” the full sequence is helpfully compiled here into a playlist by youtube user SiestaYonJyuGo
these videos are strange, alarming things. their horror is not of gore, but of disorientation. they present a world which has become dissociated and unreal. they use a camera, but the images it produces are flickering abstractions, fragmented and not meant to be pieced together. distortions in the audio and visuals are a constant in the videos - they’re a sign of slender man’s presence. what they really are is an awareness of medium.
the story is told almost entirely as images and text - there is little dialogue, and what dialogue there is is almost always secondary to the images & text. the audio is important, but only for its asemic content - it’s purely affective jabs of white noise and distortion that tell you when slender man is near. when slender man is near, you are reminded that you are watching a video. you are reminded that this is not real.
the characters themselves seem to be aware of a certain kind of unreality. in addition to the abstract camerawork, they are often writing, making marks. for jay, the character who runs the youtube account and uploads the videos, his voice only comes through in what he has written around the videos: white text on a black screen, giving sparse context. he has a dark double, in the form of the masked man/totheark, who uploads videos with meaningless or garbled text, white on a black screen. along with them, we see alex (who exists one narrative layer down from jay and totheark) scribbling on pages - he creates words, asemic writing, and abstract images of slender man. he never moves towards realism.
why such a strained relationship with reality? the same reason as lovecraft - and as the writers of gothic novels a hundred years before him. the creators of marble hornets are expressing the first wave of what has become by 2016 a widespread anxiety with a rapidly changing communication paradigm. consensus reality is based in paradigms of communication - but during periods of flux, consensus reality breaks down, as do mediums of communication. marble hornets sits at the intersection of the contextless memes native to the web (and out of which it was born) and film. it doesn’t have traditional scenes or narrative - instead it matches text with abstract, fragmented images shot in an overtly amateurish (but secretly fairly skilled) way. the disorientation it produces is the disorientation of being a heavy internet user, and being on the receiving end of context collapse all the time.
the most important thing alex scribbles is the operator symbol. this is a circle with an x through it. it has no clear meaning - it shows up throughout the series, scratched on the sides of buildings or flickering through totheark videos. It is an empty signifier, an arbitrary hyperlink inscribed into analogue space. This place is connected to that place - how, why? - it doesn’t matter.
this pairs with the series’ visual fixation on buildings and structures that resist interpretation. from the scenery of Introduction to the red tower to this inscrutable concrete structure, there’s a heavy element of ruin porn in this series. but it’s not for nothing: these are structures that ostensibly have some function, but its been lost or forgotten or its just not visible in the camera - the medium cannot capture it, cannot communicate it.
this accelerates towards the end of the sequence, when doors begin acting strangely. first we see a tape of alex exploring a burned out building - climbing stairs, then ending up in the basement. then doors start taking jay to the wrong places: he gets caught in repetetive loops while exploring a deserted house, unable to get where he’s going. The physical structures of the world begin to resemble the textual structures of the web, linked together senselessly in a semiotic web with no center or content, only feeling: fear.
marble hornets is a creature intensely in and of the web - slender man the frankenstein’s creature of our era. this post is already too long, but things marble hornets also deals with: why are men’s selfies always so bad, what is it like to be observed through social media, disconnect from nature, nostalgia culture, the presence of the body in textual media, the manifold doubling of characters, human memory vs. recorded memory, authenticity, meaninglessness, encryption, possibly more?
as a palate cleanser, here’s a silly little slender man video i made in 2012, and here’s a random collection of still frames from marble hornets videos i took while writing this
