Marble Hornets, sometimes abbreviated as MH, is a horror web-series started on Youtube in 2009. Created by Troy Wagner and Joseph DeLage, the series garnered notoriety due to its usage of the Slender Man myths, which would later become popular in the early 2010s, along with incorporating ARG story elements. Since its inception, the series has been considered notable as an inspiration for other Slender Man-based web-series such as EverymanHYBRID and TribeTwelve, along with receiving praise for its story-telling methods.

Before the term “analog horror” came about, we just called it a webseries or an ARG, and when other Slender Man series came about, we called it a Slenderverse series. The whole Analog Horror genre seems to be on the rage these days on YouTube. Hell, a movie that could be described as analog horror was released in theaters and became a modest hit (With the director saying he was a fan of Marble Hornets). Marble Hornets was THE webseries that basically laid out the format for what would become analog horror later down the line. It wasn’t the first horror webseries on YouTube, but I would argue it has been the most important, as so many later series would copy its format. And Marble Hornets would go on, run and become a very popular webseries due to its found-footage format that gives it its amateur film making a certain spooky realism.

As a masterpiece of slender man, it is important to note that its popularity would spread the Slender Man throughout the Internet. The series would cement certain characteristics for the entity, such having the abilities to distort video/audio recordings, teleport, manipulate time in a non-linear fashion, and cause various ailments for those who encounter him frequently (Such as nausea, hallucinations, paranoia, fainting, memory loss, and even being mind-controlled).

Why is Marble Hornets so good? Why is Slender man scary? You’re likely to hear some version of this response: slender man is scary not because of what you know about him but because of what you don’t know. “It’s like the trifecta of unknowables,” said Adam Rosner, the creator of “TribeTwelve,” another webseries. “Unknown, uncanny and unintelligible. So Marble Honerts as such a low-cost, homemade interpretation, the atmosphere It shows is ambiguous, “This reason, It was the fact that it was vague,” Mr. Wagner said recently. “I think that’s why people jumped on it.”

So as such an existing Marble Hornets, it opens the prelude to ARG, what is the ARG here? An ARG—also known as an alternate reality game—is a form of storytelling that uses interactive media like social media accounts and videos to tell a story. The Internet is full of ARG accounts that use social media apps like Twitter and video-based websites like YouTube to tell their stories.

This is a really unique way of presenting a narrative, as it allows the creator to use the audience’s responses to shape what happens and take feedback or use creative methods like subtitles, descriptions, and tags to give hints. There are a ton of super unique and intriguing ARGs on YouTube, and a lot of them are somewhat eerie or even straight-up horror-themed, making the mysteries that they present to viewers particularly interesting for people that like creepy stories. And most ARG videos or games take full advantage of an all-digital format, spreading from niche forums to popular social media sites, eventually ballooning into an enduring online phenomenon. Others remain relatively obscure, serving as works of unheralded art house horror lying in wait for new, unsuspecting viewers.