unforum

[Zebesian]

What is the Draw to this Series?

[Slendylvr]

I personally think I was at first (like many others) because MH was the first place I ever saw the Slenderman. You have to ask yourself, "why are people scared of slenderman?" The reason people are scared about anything is because we are scared of things we don't fully understand. Examples...some people are scared of:aliens,ghosts,death,ect. Why? It's because we don't fully understand what they are,if they exist, and so on. I think that's why many people are drawn to Slenderman. They don't fully understand him/her/it and of its intentions. Add in a creepy, masked man who is stalking you in the middle of the night and you have yourself a good plot line for a scary "tale" if you want to call it that.

[Gerdef]

If checking the video tape you set up to record you sleep and finding a masked figure IN YOUR BEDROOM watching you sleep isn't scary, then I don't know what is.

[Guestface Killah]

it seems like you're not willing to suspend your disbelief enough for this series. Admittedly, I don't enjoy it when any sort of movie or show I'm watching requires me to be stupid and obediently think 'okay, that's possible', but when you say things like 'cameras cant really distort like that' or 'slenderman's really not that tall', then it seems like you're not letting yourself be absorbed into the story because of otherwise minuscule details you don't like (or moreso details that, i suppose, fans of the series may not agree with you on, seeing that they enjoy it).

I hope what I've said holds some sort of relevance to your question. After all I am but a lowly guest and am not practiced in the art of posting on these strange wonderful forums.

[gordon_ramsay]

I think what initially drew our attention to MH was the fact that it was the first incarnation of slenderman outside of mere pictures and text. The Mh crew had brought to life something that was only 2 dimensional, and therefore choked up as a "Very good photoshop" creature.We, as humans, have both a fascination and a fear of the unknown and unexplained. Wehn we see it in a picture or have it described to us in text, it draws us in, but those are just mere stories. When we actually see the unknown manifest in SM on youtube or whatever video outlet you wish, we are both drawn to it, and enveloped in the sense that seeing is truly believing.

Since MH was in fact, the first video incarnation of SM most of us saw, we immediately latched on and ran with it. What EMH did was add a little more, an example being that they admitted that they added an SM character in their videos, but that some of the SM sightings weren't theirs.

So, what draws us to MH so much? I believe that it is the fact that seeing is believeing, and MH brought us that belief.

[Dray]

Marble Hornets was the first video series revolving around Slender Man and the guys who put it together were clever enough to hook me with questions and that bit of fear that comes with something new and scary, even if it wasn't necessarily believable.

As for Slender Man, I like the version of him that we see in MH better than a lot of the drawings and photoshop manipulations out there. The fact that he's not a looming be-tentacled creature places him in uncanny valley, rather in monster town... and for me, the former is much scarier. Full on double rainbows monsters are awesome and fun when designed properly. Slendy in his multi-armed looming goodness is neat but... ultimately forgettable. He becomes more ridiculous to me when he looks less like he could actually exist and might be lurking behind me when I'm on a walk at night.

Besides, a lot of the Slender Man Mythos seems to revolve in being followed and the resulting disappearances, which I think is what Marble Hornets nailed. The slaughter part is so generically horrific that I'm happy they wound up keeping that to a minimum.

TotheArk is nifty and goofy and I think that I just really enjoyed the creepy pasta art films, and the time that the guys spent putting those together. Warning was fecking awesome -- the stop motion animation and blurry head tilting et all was bizarre and I really hope we get to see more of that. Same with ######; there was some really fun editing that went into that!

So... I guess that what I like about Marble Hornets is that I can see the obsession and dedication that went into pulling it off. A lot of the other blogs and stories have some very interesting plot and ideas, but maybe the same kind of fire isn't lurking there in the little details.

/artsy defense get

[Gerdef]

MH feeds on a lot of really good nightmare fuel.

-Being stalked or followed
-Being watched
-Being controlled
-No escape

Also because we've never seen Slendy actually do anything, that means he's even more scary, because he clearly does the worst thing you can possible imagine.

I think the thing that really drives it home for me is how he's just... there. He can seemingly appear anywhere, at any time. But he doesn't do it enough that you get used to it.

Which just makes it worse, because now all the times he could appear... you're watching for him. He could be just around the corner. He could be in that shadow. Or in that shadow. Or right behind you.

He never appears with fanfare. He never appears with a flash. Just calmly, coolly, suddenly, he's there. And he's watching you.

As for Masky, I don't know how people find him silly, or funny. (Well okay, some of the TTA videos...) One of the scariest scenes in the entire series IMO is when J is investigating the House, and looks up and Masky is just there, watching him from the end of the hallway.

And then all of a sudden he charges and he's in your face and--

I dunno. I'm a fairly secure guy, but the vision of a masked attacker suddenly rushing at me, illuminated only by my flashlight ranks up there for images that haunt my nightmares.

[Gymen]

What MH did to scare us was the feeling it gave us. It seemed so real, we worried a lot.

[Dray]

The first time that Masky showed up and bull-rushed the camera I had a conniption, too. That was pretty frightening stuff! (Even if Jay did have it coming for entering an abandoned house at night...)

When Jay fell down and started coughing the first time he entered the house, I really thought that he was throwing up; that really got me just because watching other people barf makes me very queasy. It set up the house as a scary place in general so watching those entries was extra nerve-wracking for me.

[JKatkina]

Anyways, I think the urge to see Masky as 'cute' comes from an attempt by a certain variety of MH fan to deal with and mitigate the terror of the character. He has a few moments that could be seen as weirdly harmless (I'm thinking when he was sitting on Jay's dresser kicking his legs), but in the context of the rest of the character's actions, that mostly just adds to the eerie!

I also wanted to add that some of the joy of the series came from watching it unfold. I came in late, but nothing beats the late-night uploads watched with a fellow fan and then discussed with wildly excited enthusiasm and shared terror on the boards for the rest of that night. The social experience was almost as much a draw for me as the series itself.

[Watson]

I think what it comes down to is that Marble Hornets was the first widely known rendition of Slenderman.

Before, you had this interesting but obscure /x/-esque meme from SomethingAwful, and it was fun for thsoe who knew about it(I was not one of those), but to anyone else it was just like "Wtf? Weird looking picture." Then Marble Hornets showed up on Youtube, and the whole thing kicked into overdrive.

Suddenly you have these blogs and these copy-cat videos, and there's all this discussion about it all over the internet. It has become a phenomenon and, although I can see why certain aspects of Marble Hornets may turn you off, the experience has been quite an important one for some people.

Although, I have to agree with you on one point; Masky is just stupid without explanation.

What is frightening about this rendition of Slenderman is how he prays off of the subconscious. You know that night where you were walking down the street and you felt like something was following you the whole time? You turned around and thought you saw something moving in the trees, but when you took a double take, it was nothing.

Slenderman.

That shadow across your window that you discovered and explained away as 'just a bird'?

Slenderman.

So while Marble Hornets' version of Slenderman lacks the 'Oooh look at me, I'm a creepy and mortifying stalker-monster thing with a bazillion tentacles' of certain other renditions of Slenderman, it makes up for it in its ability to draw on subcnscious fears and tricks of the mind, forcing the viewer to ask themselves a second time whether something was 'real' or not.

For me personally, what drew me into the series was my girlfriend showing me the first Entry and being drawn into the mysteriousness of it all. Initially, all I saw was some freaky-ass looking guy-thing standing on some dude's porch, and then turning to stare at the camera all creepy like. Obviously, since it was on Youtube, I thought that it was some one's recording of an actual event that they thought people wanted to see.

That scared the shit out of me.

So after that, my girlfriend and I sat around and watched all the Entries together. Thanks in no small part to my girlfriend,(who jumped out at me and poked fun at my fear constantly) I was paranoid for weeks. And thus, I end p here, posting about how awesome I think MH is on an internet forum.

[k-elizabeth]

I started reading through these forums after i accidentally clicked marble hornets instead of super 8 (the arg i'm currently following) and saw a thread title with slender man in it. Then later i googled it and found a web article about the Slender man legend and found it really interesting, and from there i browsed through some threads and ended up on the wikidot. I watched all the entries last night and for me what kept me watching was how some things are held back and it kind of taunts you with clips of slendy and terrifying things like masky's lunge/crouch attack thing so it's always kind of a horror mystery that promises to keep scaring you and keeps adding clues to explain later but that also allow for our own minds to work and think about

I think that's how the best scary movies and args become successful, or at least interesting, by leaving some loose ends and letting our own minds go wild and image what horrors weren't shown, that way we fill in the gaps with what interests us or horrifies us and by not giving us closure with a definite explanation, the events stick with us longer (like Cloverfield: the monster's origins were never clear-cut explained for us and people still discuss their opinions and imaginings of where clover came from)

[SickSlickMan]

[Mattwan]

Zebesian, I can sort of see where you're coming from. The acting is weak and the characterization is pretty thin; normally, that alone would make me lose interest.

(Also, the playground tape? I may be alone in this, but I found that entry to be simply awful. It reminded me way too much of one of those Scooby Doo chase scenes where the monster and the gang end up wackily running past one another.)

I have no problem with the video effects, though. In fact, for me, they're one of the more effective aspects of the production. If they break the illusion for you, though, it's little surprise that the series doesn't grab you.

So why does it work for me? A big part is the character of Slender Man himself. I'm one of those people with the common fear of looking out of a window and seeing somebody staring back. Just the idea of seeing someone watching is terrifying, completely separated from any idea of what that person might (want to) do. If you don't share that fear, again, it's no surprise MH doesn't work for you; it is the essence of why Slender Man is terrifying, at least for me.

Even more effective is the fact that MH seems to be in the same genre as the best of David Lynch's work. The characters are almost always presented with flattened affects, which really helps sell the weak (not bad!) acting. This also, maybe paradoxically, makes the characters feel more like real people than larger-than-life characters in a work of fiction. There's no room for the viewer to escape into thinking, "OK, that's Alex doing what a character like Alex would do."

There's also the very Lynchian (and Fortean, if we want to go back) idea that reality is much bigger and more incomprehensible than any of us can understand. We are presented with an entity with a nature completely *other* than anything that we know. We can speculate on his abilities and weaknesses and motivations, but the work itself does everything but come right out and tell us that this speculation is pointless. There's a sense that Slender Man may be bound by some sort of laws just like we're bound by biology and physics, but there's no suggestion that we can ever know what those laws are.

I've gone on way too long already, so I'll stop. I'll just say that it's OK not to like MH, and that it doesn't show any aesthetic failing on your part. Its strength isn't so much in its production as in its nature, and if its nature doesn't appeal to you then it just won't work for you. At least, that's how it seems to me.

[SlendoMusic]

It's not about Slender Man being a "terrifying monster". I would argue the more monster he is, the less scary he is. The thing about Marble Hornets is that while everything is very hard to believe, you end up believing that someone is watching you anyway. It invokes the sense of being watched.

Also, one could argue that Marble Hornets isn't just some horror: it's a mystery, and it's a mystery that a fanbase wants to know more about, and that is why we keep coming back to watch the next installement.