Marble Hornets, Season One

Marble Hornets opens with the narrator Jay Merrick (played by Troy Wagner), who gives a brief summary of the events that transpired between Alex Kralie and himself on that night in video form, uploaded on YouTube. It's backed with footage of an unknown person driving. It's either Jay or Alex filming, though.

Alex Kralie was filming a student film in 2006 entitled Marble Hornets, featuring himself mainly. He acted as a director, writer, editor, actor, and musician on the soundtrack. Of course, always a good sign of talent. Tommy Wiseau type talent. Brian Thomas was another actor in the film, alongside Timothy Wright, Sarah Reid, and Jay himself. Timothy also worked with Alex on the soundtrack. Seth Wilson was the cameraman and co-editor; Sarah would sometimes act as a stand-in in Seth's absence; and Jay was the assistant script supervisor.

The plot of the movie was something which is totally typical of a student film. Seeing as how student films are generally relatively low quality, Marble Hornets was no exception. It's a cheesy downer romantic movie about a man (played by Brian) trying to find his place in life and trying to get back together with his previous romantic interest (played by Sarah) after moving back to the town where he attended school.

Nonetheless, things were going pretty well in the beginning. Despite the pretentiousness that Alex held up and the fact that the movie was obviously going to be trite no matter what, everything was going just fine for what it was. This was, until Alex began running into some troubling matters.

He began to see... a tall man, off in the distance. A very tall man, often marked as a silhouette alone. You'd be surprised to find out it wasn't the Slender Man. In fact, it was a completely different monster that is pretty much the same. It just doesn't have manpuppets and multiple arms.

It's called the Operator.

This tall man drove Alex to nigh insanity over the amount of time that he worked on his movie. He became more irritable and angry around his cast as Jay drifted away from working on the movie with the rest of the group, not ever seeing this all happen to him.

Seeing as how we'll spend most of this from Jay's perspective, I won't spoil Alex's fun times that would come later on. ;)

Jay continues on to view the tapes that Alex had made and collected. There were... oddities. Oddities which were inexplainable. Yes, it shows the Operator man, we'll get that out of the way right now. And, alongside that, Alex slowly spiraling into madness.

On July 22, 2009, after Jay had posted nine consecutive videos entitled entries, not including the Introduction video, responses from another channel called totheark had begun to surface. They were very cryptic videos, codes encasing messages for Jay to unravel and learn about. Meanwhile, Jay was getting heavily entranced with all that was happening around him. Jay decides to head an investigation in search of Alex. Jay's physical health also begins to quickly deteriorate. He has fevers frequently, and falls ill almost constantly. Totheark would slowly reveal more and more, like the fact that he had been stalking Jay since at least the summer of 2006, when the film was being shot.

In October, Jay interviewed Tim to kick off his investigation, under the guise that he only wanted to finish Alex's film. Tim recalled little of his time working on Marble Hornets, most only that he only knew Alex through Brian and that as filming went along he became increasingly angered, to the point of where he would be berating his cast more than filming his movie. Someone was also leaving dead animals in his yard.

Jay would then receive an anonymous tip as to where Brian might have been located. He goes to the location to find a ransacked house. He picks up a multitude of collectibles while there; a pill bottle, a bullet casing, and multiple illustrations. While there, he also has a coughing fit. Totheark films him from behind, Jay unaware. Jay also finds dried blood in the sink in the bathroom. Something horrible must have happened to Brian here.


Jay would later return to the house to find it altered once more. He, himself, was in a disheveled state to find that he was not alone. Another person was there, a masked man, affectionately dubbed by fans as "Masky"; Masky attacked Jay and struggled with him, eventually resulting in Jay's successful self-defense and escape. Jay did, however, try to remove his mask; to no avail. Jay ran out of the house as the camera stopped recording, and he woke up on the side of the road the next morning with no memory of what happened after he had stopped. Jay states that he's realized that something dangerous is going on and he's starting to regret ever getting involved with it now.


A few weeks later, Jay uploads surveillance footage from inside his own home. He goes to bed, but then Masky would break in and take him from his bed for three hours before he would return to it. Totheark would upload a response video showing what happened to him; he had been taken back to the house, where he stared in a trance-like state at the Operator.

Jay then went on to cover the things that he'd found at the house, such as the papers and the bullet casing. The pill bottle was empty now although it was previously half-filled, the bullet casing was now missing and the papers remained intact. On the back of one of them said the words, "AT THE TOWER". In an earlier 2006 tape, a large red tower out in the middle of the woods appears. He plans to go out there eventually.

Jay would then finish uploading the remainder of the 2006 tapes, the last video having a somewhat important clue. Tim appeared in the episode, holding a pill bottle, much reminiscent of the pill bottle found by Jay on his first visit to the house.

Totheark would then reply, urging Jay further to go to the tower. He gave in to the consensus and went, to find yet another 2006 tape at the top of it. He would later hesitantly upload the piece. Hesitantly, as it contained very disturbing content.

That of Seth and Alex running around in a boiler room at night, and Seth being taken by the Operator. Alex makes his final remarks; he's unable to remember what happened after the end of filming, and he's going to burn the tapes and move away.

Jay has no other leads to turn to, thus why he would then return to the house. He decided to go in the day, considering that going there at night seems to be a worse idea. The idea worked out horribly, as he was then teleported throughout the home, chasing about the masked man as night rose quicker than it should have. Eventually Jay was in the same boiler room, trying to find his escape; but only to meet face to face with the Operator. Jay states that his camera has stopped working. He has others, but he also says that it doesn't matter to him anymore. He's done with this; he doesn't want to know the answers anymore.

Totheark would then reply with a video entitled Warning on February 3, 2010. The video contained the masked man, confirming Jay's suspicion that the masked man was the person behind the channel, or at least one of them (he notes that the videos do send mixed messages to him). Jay would then upload a twenty-fourth entry, stating that he felt that he needed to see what was going on one more time, thus leading him back into the investigation; this footage was more surveillance, but it was perhaps stranger than the other. Jay would get up from his sleeping, exit his room, but not come out the other side. He notes there's no way he could've left, considering that all of the exits are blocked. He comes back to his room two hours later and immediately passes out.

Totheark would then hack into Jay's account, giving a horrifying statement; "We will wait for you no more. Control is being taken away from you. From the start, it's been a game for us. Not anymore. I'm coming for you. And you will lead me... to the ark."

This gave Jay a scare. He would then leave his apartment to go to a hotel. Later on that month, Jay reported that he was staying at a hotel hen he got a text from a friend that told him to turn on his television and go to the news channel. What he saw was his apartment building burning down, along with nearly all of his belongings. He believes totheark to be behind the attack.

On April 4, 2010, Jay would then receive a text message from an unknown number, reading "41810".

On April 18, 2010, Jay recorded a short video after having jumped hotels for the past few days, saying that he would be leaving town and that it would be in his best interest to leave all of this behind. This would be his last entry.

That was, until he found a package with a camcorder tape inside of it on his doorstep. Watching it, he found footage of... someone wearing a mask of a skull; then, of Alex with his girlfriend after moving away, Amy Walters, dated only two weeks before; on the day he received the text message. Amy had found his old camcorder from college (where he'd filmed Marble Hornets) and started filming him with it. Amy pushes him for his paranoid behaviour on the camera as he asks her to put it away. By the time she budged, they were already too late; the Operator had been summoned, as the two ran upstairs, and Alex told her to jump out of the window and get down to the street. The video freezes on the Operator before cutting to a frame of a shaking paper, with a written word: "HELP".

Jay, seeing that Alex was still alive, vowed to find him then. He didn't know when he'd be back, either; and he thanked viewers for the help they'd given him. Jay then went silent on all fronts.