# Marble Hornets Marble Hornets is a found-footage horror web series that ran on YouTube from 2009 to 2014, following film student Jay Merrick as he sorts through his friend Alex Kralie's abandoned student film tapes and finds a faceless figure stalking him. Created by Troy Wagner and Joseph DeLage, it pulled the then-brand-new Slender Man out of a Something Awful photoshop thread and turned him into the anchor of an ARG that shaped an entire era of creepypasta YouTube. ## Origin The Slender Man character that anchors the series surfaced days earlier in the Something Awful 'Create Paranormal Images' thread in June 2009, where users including Victor Surge were building out the mythos in doctored black and white photos[3]. Troy Wagner and Joseph DeLage created the Marble Hornets YouTube channel on June 19, 2009[6] and uploaded the first video, 'Introduction,' the following day. In it, roadside footage plays under white on-screen text explaining that a friend named Alex cancelled a film called Marble Hornets and left behind tapes the narrator now plans to sort through[2]. - **Platform:** YouTube - **Creator:** Troy Wagner and Joseph DeLage - **Date:** 2009 ## Overview The show runs across two YouTube accounts kept in character: the main 'Marble Hornets' channel dropping numbered entries, and a partner channel called 'totheark' answering back with cryptic, static-drowned videos that fans decoded frame by frame[1]. Every clip is presented as tape that Jay just discovered and uploaded, so the ARG lived in the metadata: hidden text, backwards audio, in-character tweets, and reply videos treated as canon. The full run stretched over three seasons and 133 videos, split between 87 official entries and 39 totheark responses[6]. Individual uploads range from a few silent seconds of hallway footage to fifteen-minute confrontations with the entity the fandom calls The Operator, an unusual mix of runtimes for pre-2015 YouTube[1]. ## How It Spread A companion channel, totheark, appeared on July 22, 2009, replying to the ninth main entry with a video titled 'Regards' that hid the message 'LOOK CLOSELY' in its imagery[4]. Fans started picking each upload apart for QR codes, morse, and backwards audio, turning passive viewership into an ARG that fed Slenderverse spin-offs like Everyman HYBRID and TribeTwelve[1]. The main channel wrapped on June 20, 2014, exactly five years to the day after it began, with 'Entry #87'[5]. Looking back at the ten-year mark, The Verge quoted co-writer Tim Sutton describing the series as 'vintage internet,' only 'a couple years removed from the land of flash videos and You're the Man Now, Dog'[1]. Wagner kept building in the same universe afterward. Clear Lakes 44, a 13-broadcast spin-off posted to the main channel in August 2015, was cancelled after the creative team split[6]. A film spin-off, Always Watching: A Marble Hornets Story, hit VOD in April 2015 to poor reviews, followed by a five-issue comic continuation drawn by Jackie Reynolds that cleared $28,000 on Kickstarter in 2019[6]. ## How to Use Since Marble Hornets is a narrative series rather than a template, 'using' it typically means citing it as the founding YouTube found-footage ARG whenever the conversation turns to Slender Man, coded 'LOOK CLOSELY' style analysis videos, or later Slenderverse projects like Everyman HYBRID and TribeTwelve[1]. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is Marble Hornets? Marble Hornets is a found-footage horror web series that ran on YouTube from 2009 to 2014, built around the Slender Man mythos and structured as tapes a character named Jay Merrick discovered and uploaded[1]. ### Where did Marble Hornets come from? Troy Wagner and Joseph DeLage launched the Marble Hornets YouTube channel on June 19, 2009 and posted the first video, 'Introduction,' the next day[2]. ### What does Marble Hornets mean? Marble Hornets is the in-fiction title of the cancelled student film whose tapes the main character is sorting through, and it doubles as the name of the YouTube channel he uploads them to[2]. ### How do you use Marble Hornets? The series is name-checked as the founding YouTube found-footage ARG whenever people talk about Slender Man, Slenderverse spin-offs like Everyman HYBRID or TribeTwelve, or the coded-video style that totheark helped popularize[1]. ### Is Marble Hornets still popular? The main channel ended in 2014, but the team kept working in the universe, with a Kickstarter-funded comic continuation clearing $28,000 in 2019[6]. ## References 1. [https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/22/18701350/youtube-creepypasta-marble-hornets-slenderman]() 2. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wmhfn3mgWUI]() 3. [https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3150591&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=3]() 4. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmqDPBu1UaM]() 5. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iBnnpn7-F8]() 6. [https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/marble-hornets]() --- Source: https://meme.com/memes/marble-hornetsyo-admins-dont-even-think-about-touching-this-until-i-say-so Published by meme.com — The Internet Meme Library