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[TNC]

If anything, they'd have to have taken turns; When Brian is in the car with Alex, and Alex is saying Tim's lines, Slender Man appears. Brian can't be in costume when Slender Man is busy being ominous.

[lifegospel]

Don't worry TNC, I don't really believe in Santa Claus either, that doesn't mean he exists


...Don't mind me, I'm sleep deprived. And playing the devils advocate.

[Jake]

Agreed. I don't like the prank theory either, but one can at least make a case.

[TNC]

I say we all take a break from this Marble Hornets stuff and go watch Devil's Advocate, starring Al Pacino and Keanu Reeves.

[lifegospel]

.....No, I think I'll stay wrapped up here with my House and Criminal Minds thanks.

[TNC]

Oh my God, the House season premiere was fucking amazing.

[lifegospel]

Amen, and new episode tonight as well.

ack on topic, however, I tried overlaying the Operator audio with when the sound cuts out on entry 13, which seems to work. You can hear running at the right moments, but the audio cuts out again JUST before we see SM the second time.

[TNC]

Well... So, wait, that's actually really big.

And, "Regards remains untapped."

Well, first thing we can do, is, Regards and Operator were the first two totheark videos, right?

So, Regards was for number 9, and Operator was for number 10. Perhaps Regards has something to do with Entry 12? I don't remember what was in Regards, other than the music hidden in the Audio track... Perhaps it's a clue as to where they were? It SOUNDS like some boisterous marching-band. Perhaps they were on campus?

[fezzik]

I'm new at this stuff, but I've read a lot of detective fiction stores, and been thinking a lot about MH, and what I keep going back to, Poirot-style, is the moment when Alex hands over the tapes to J. That moment in time just doesn't make any sense to me, no matter how I slice it up. Why tape things? (Because you're scared, and making a movie) Why keep the tapes? Why consider burning them, but then fail to do so? Why give them to J? Fear would lead someone to run away or burn the tapes. If Alex felt he could do something further he most likely would; the implication is that he considered the event "finished", or at least his personal involvement in it.

Consider that what we see is exactly what happened. Then Alex went through some incredibly traumatic and at least spooky if not paranormal event, taped all of it, held onto the tapes for quite a while, but then handed them over to the first person that did little more than ask nicely, and then disappeared. I'm having trouble coming up with an event that meets that description. Some of you, for example, have suggested that somebody died or at least disappeared during the filming. It's hard to imagine that Alex would have then kept the incriminating tapes, done nothing about them, but handed them over to J. Yes, Nixon taped himself doing illegal things, but he didn't exactly hand the tapes to the first person who asked. I'm left feeling that Alex felt somewhat remorseful over the whole thing, or at least regretful, but not personally or legally responsible.

What we need is an event that is spooky enough to scare the sh*t out of Alex, followed by a denoument of some sort that leaves Alex upset or regretful, but no longer terribly scared. But that event can't completely remove Alex's concern, because he cares enough to tell J he never wants to hear from him again. There's only a few scenarios that honestly make sense to me:

1) J is flat-out lying about how he got the tapes. Either he got them from Alex some other way, or much of the back-story (which we really mostly have J's word for) is completely fabricated. Then that moment in time doesn't need explaining because it doesn't exist.

2) Something happened in-between the end of the taping and the moment where Alex hands the tapes off to J to make Alex much less concerned - but not entirely unregretful - about their contents. Slender Man was discovered to be a moderately creepy but harmless prank, or an alien that left forever (because it got what it wanted?), or there was a missed opportunity of some sort, or for some reason Alex was convinced he personally was no longer in danger/involved, either paranormally or just legally.

3) [OOG] The creators didn't really think through that part and just needed, for logistical reasons, things to have worked out that way. After all, if J doesn't get the tapes, this is a very short work of Chaotic Fiction. [/OOG]

[TNC]

While all points are valid, J claims to have gone through quite a lot of coersion to get the tapes from Alex. There was no nice asking going on here; He had to bully Alex into giving up the tapes.

[what]

The biggest plot hole in this theory is that they somehow covered up a murder so well, that no one, not even his family or friends, noticed he's missing. Why isn't J investigating the mysterious disappearance of one of the cast members instead of his friend moving away?

[fezzik]

@TNC: I see what you're getting at, but J's description of the event seems more like he "convinced" him than "bullied" him. I mean, there's no implication (at least on J's part) that he had any real leverage with Alex over the tapes; no blackmail, just peer pressure and referencing the fact that it would be a shame to lose the tapes after all that work. That's not really a very convincing argument if you're facing someone who's scared or worried about something. It isn't like Alex seemed terribly concerned with Marble Hornets (the actual frame story he was filming).

[TNC]

I assume you mean J wasn't concerned with the filming. It's likely J just wanted the tapes because he didn't feel like buying hundreds of tapes on his own; Used tapes can be written over.

Three years after the fact, maybe he needed a tape and saw something fucked up on it, so he began to look at them all.

[fezzik]

No, I meant Alex. At the time J was convincing him to hand over the tapes, Alex no longer seemed concerned with finishing the movie. I'm not concerned with J's motivation for wanting the tapes - that seems natural - nor with J looking at them years later - that seems natural too. What seems odd is that Alex would give them to him. If I had tapes like the ones Alex has, including shots of me bleeding profusely out of my head, and for some reason decided to hang onto them, you wouldn't be able to convince me to give them to you unless you had a damn good reason. I certainly wouldn't casually hand them over and just say "hey, if you see weird sh*t and me bleeding out of my head, just keep it to yourself, ok?" One would imagine that Alex would have expected J to watch the videos fairly quickly (which he didn't do), or at least have considered that to be a possible event, which means Alex was unconcerned with J knowing what's on the tapes. Presumably because he (Alex) was expecting to be unavailable effective immediately (dead? gone forever? hiding?), or I suppose possibly because he had some other reason to just not give a damn anymore. But it's hard to imagine not caring about what's on those tapes.

Any such damn good reason, if it exists, has not been revealed to us and would mean either J was hiding something or that something very odd happened after the taping but before J got the tapes. This is all IMHO of course.

I can't shake the feeling, too, that there's more in the videos we've already gotten that we're just not figuring out. I have visions of an irritated PM sitting somewhere tapping his feet and going "come *on*, guys!"

[TNC]

Well, you know, we're not exactly people capable of arguing what Alex was thinking during the prelude to these events, we don't have enough evidence surrounding the event.

Your best bet would be to just ask J how he got them. If he tries to play it off, which I assume he'd do to make it painfully obvious that he's lying, then we can take it into account.

If he comes clean and tells you exactly how it all happened, well, then we can probably find something more concrete in it.