Always Watching: A Marble Hornets Story

This is what is scary about this movie: its 90 minutes of annoying people screaming at each other. Every two minutes is a jump scare. This story is terrible. Slenderman has nothing to do at all in this movie. He just stands around. He isn't even most of the jump scares.

It isn't often you have so many lead characters that have nothing about them that you like.

Skips this one. It's too late for me. Save yourself.

Okay, the big point of contention about this movie revolves around the Marble Hornets tag. For those not in the know, Marble Hornets was an ongoing, found footage web series, that spanned several years and many hours. You can catch it for free on YouTube. Without going into any detail, it was basically a found footage college project, that started getting a bit spooky and going horribly wrong. It was very well done, but did get very, very convoluted and confusing towards the end.

This movie had absolutely no connection to the web series, and would probably have done better if it was not associate with Marble Hornets. The only common thread is the character, The Operator, who was basically a representation of the Creepy Pasta character, The Slenderman. Had they run with the Slenderman storyline, it may have been more accepted than associating itself to the Marble Hornets name, which has an avid following. Putting aside the differences, as a stand alone movie, it is average, if not a little predictable, hence the 5 stars.

Did the creators of this movie just go, "We'll get permission to do a 'spinoff' of Marble Hornets, loosely 'borrow' their Slenderman-type villain's name and symbol, make a couple blink-and-you'll-miss-them references to the web series... and that way, we won't get too much crap for trying to make our own Slenderman found-footage move."

Because that plan totally backfired. This is not a Marble Hornets story. They totally screwed up how the Operator works, and with the exception of one tiny reference to the Alex Kralie character, this movie has nothing to do with Marble Hornets canon.

What would've been better is if they'd gotten Joe and Tim to write an actual Marble Hornets movie, and still kept Doug Jones as the Operator.

Apparently "Marble Hornets" the long-feature film is based on a series that can only be seen on You Tube. Personally I didn't know this series existed… No wait, let me rephrase that, personally I didn't even know there existed series that can only be seen on You Tube! Anyways, the series revolves on a fictional character referred to as Slender Man – although for legal reasons here re-baptized into 'The Operator' – who is a type of boogeyman-for-the-cyber-generation and appears in sinister internet videos rather than underneath your bed. The bad news, however, is that "Marble Hornets" is also one of those dreadful Found-Footage horror movies, which means that the hand-held camera-work is horrendous (and, no, it's not adding any atmosphere or suspense), the characters are underdeveloped and over- the-top hysterical most of the time and that the film ends suddenly and abrupt without any type of proper explanation. Sara and Milo are a not-so professional duo of news reporters, sharing a brief but uncomfortably awkward love history, are following around a team of evictors for a human-interest documentary. They enter a rather nice and well-decorated middle-class family house where the residents cleared rushed out of unforeseen and in a hurry. They stumble upon a pile of family videos and discover that the father became gradually paranoid – and righteously so – because he always spotted a sinister figure observing his family from a distance. This perpetrator can only be seen through the lens of a camera and pretty soon he's also stalking Sara, Milo and their obnoxious supervisor Charlie. If you disregard the connection with the Internet series, "Marble Hornets: The Operator" is an incredibly mundane and forgettable movie. The only remotely interesting added value in the script is the unhealthy relationship between the lead protagonists. For example, Sara and Charlie learn about the existence of The Operator when they stumble upon Milo's private videos in which he's stalking Sara. Both the appearance and the background story of The Operator aren't very interesting or scary, and he honestly doesn't do a whole lot apart from discretely standing in the background. If there ever was a movie that is suitable for Found-Footage fanatics only, it must be this one.

I'm a pretty big fan of the "Marble Hornets" YouTube series. Gotta say though, this was a pretty big letdown.

None of the personality, intrigue, or clever storytelling of the original series makes it into the movie.

Average at best. But considering how strong the OG stuff was, this is a pile of crap.