If you’ve never heard of the Marble Hornets channel on Youtube, watch the first ten or so videos on here. (Don’t worry, they’re short.)

And pretend that you’ve just stumbled onto this during a solitary, late-night internet browsing session. Or that a friend is showing this to you, totally convinced that what you’re watching is real… A sort of documentary, of a group of friends being stalked and disappeared by something strongly resembling Slenderman.

That was my introduction, twelve years ago. I didn’t believe it was real, but the guy who showed it to me did… and we’ll just say that’s a testament to the realism Marble Hornets strove for, and succeeded at so well that when watching it you can’t help but take a break and peek out through your blinds into the backyard, just to make sure someone isn’t out there, watching you.

The videos are at first presented with a basic set up: Alex Kralie has given up making his student film, however his friend and fellow student, Jay, talks him into giving over his tapes of raw footage for posterity’s sake. As Jay reviews the tapes, he starts to notice something odd lurking in the background: a man in a suit, tall and slender… who seems to be fixated on Alex. As Jay posts more and more videos—titled “entries”—he becomes harassed by a man in a mask and hood and goes searching for the other cast members, who have all gone missing over the years. And right on his heels, always just close enough to maybe be hiding behind a tree, or in that one room of that one abandoned building, is the enigmatic, Slenderman-esque Operator.

And of course, Jay films everything.

Marble Hornets ran from 2009 to 2014, presenting audiences with an immersive style of storytelling that wasn’t just confined to video, or even to a single Youtube channel. Not long after Jay’s search began, an account titled “totheark” started posting videos in response. One of the first of these responses was of the person behind the camera stalking Jay into the woods, while Jay had been filming a previous entry. These short, disturbing entries ran parallel to the main channel as the story progressed, taunting Jay and the audience.

The videos were cryptic: distorted audio, snippets of quotes, number sequences and even coordinates, all for fans to decode and investigate—or at least speculate on—in hopes of helping Jay figure out this nightmare. And in that way, it drew us in even further. It made us, the audience, part of the story.

Realism is a crucial feature of the series. Each entry runs a different length—such as tapes “recovered” from Alex and other sources lasting less than a minute, to recordings of Jay’s firsthand investigations climbing up into the beefy 14- to 15-minute mark, crafted as such to erase the sense of artificiality, of intentional creation. Being found footage, the camerawork isn’t neat—it gets shaky, especially when the cameraperson is running for their life. But the moments of neat, semi-professional shooting make sense, when you consider that most of the camerapeople have some amount of filmmaking experience from college. This adherence to realism comes out strongest with entries 26 and 27, when (mild spoiler) Jay wakes up in a hotel room with no memory of the last seven months. The gap between those entries’ uploads is from April 2010 to November 2010—seven months.

Even the actors’ varied skill in front of the camera adds to the realism—they feel like regular people, not movie characters. They’re awkward on camera, talking with normal cadences and vocabulary. They weren’t dressed by a costume department; you get the sense that the clothes they’re wearing are the actors’ in real life. It slowly immerses the audience into this world, not by trying to make the characters seem real, but by letting the actors just be people.

That “authentic” reality makes Marble Hornets that much creepier. While jump-scares abound, what truly elevates the series’ realism is the discomforting, exquisitely subtle wrongness that pervades their world. After spending the first few entries watching the Operator slink up from an abandoned building, or stalk off into the shadowy woods, you begin expecting that to happen at any and every location. This makes the times when it doesn’t happen all the more nerve-wracking, because if it didn’t show up this time… then it must be coming in the next entry… right? Every trip into the wooded park, or expedition into some abandoned hospital, becomes primed with the threat not of the monster itself, but of the simple fact that it could be there.

And that’s the genre at its best.

It makes this world creepy, infects even the normal locations with threat: the anonymous small towns, the backroads during the day and—even worse—at night. The woods. Those godawful woods. Even in the most intense, stressful moments, when they’re running from the Operator, everyone around them is just living their lives. You can see the headlights of distant cars, and people hiking in the parks, entirely unaware of the reality-shattering horrors unfolding just beyond their periphery.

And if these things can play out around people who aren’t aware of it… what does that mean for us, watching it all directly?

Are you going to see a too-tall man in the woods, now? Outside your window? In your bedroom?

The paranoia seeps in, whispering: What if this is real?

The lack of separation of viewers from story is the heart of Marble Hornets, and what made it such a phenomenon—utilizing the immediacy and connectivity of social media to pull viewers in, at a time when Slenderman had just crawled out of the primordial ooze of his creation on a Something Awful forum in 2009. His appearances up to that point were almost exclusively confined to photoshopped images, of an unnerving menace hovering in the background of children’s photos. And suddenly he’d showed up onscreen, an active threat. It overcomes the series’ weaknesses—like the convoluted portions of the narrative and the lack of definitive answers which, while intentional in order to keep fans engaged with theories and speculation, can be aggravating after finishing the series. Yet it has kept the series compelling, ten years after it finished. Are people going to believe these videos? Unlikely. But will you find yourself peeking out through the blinds? Quite probably. Or maybe you’ll lose a little sleep… and that’s always good enough, isn’t it?

Photo Credit: Point North Media