ConnectiCon 2014: Marble Hornets Q&A

Hanna Lafferty ’16 / Emertainment Monthly Books Section Editor
Tori DeYeso ’16 / Emertainment Monthly Videographer

ConnectiCon held a press junket for the creators of the YouTube horror series, Marble Hornets. Troy Wagner, Tim Sutton, and Joseph DeLage discussed their new production company website, THAC.tv and the beginnings of their show. The Marble Hornets series began as a project Wagner started one summer, only a few weeks after the Slender Man mythos gained popularity on the SomethingAwful forums. Season One was “off the cuff,” said DeLage. Wagner said it started a as series of shots, “whatever we think is cool,” but as the show gained a following, he started forming ideas for a central plot and invited Sutton onboard as an actor. When they hit the one-million views mark on YouTube, they were surprised. “We were just doing it of SomethingAwful, so the audience for that bled over,” said Wagner, but they had no idea how their viewership would rise due to “the magic of the internet,” added Sutton. The series played a large part in cultivating the Slender Man mythos across the internet. “It’s strange that the stuff we made (the Operator symbols, memory loss, and video distortion) became a part of it,” Wagner said. When the videogame inspired by the Marble Hornets series, Slender: The Eight Pages was released, Sutton said it was “weird to recognize all those places that we found” for the series in the game. Since Slender’s release, the trio has become good friends with the game’s writer, Mark Hadley, and provided the script for the its sequel, Slender: The Arrival.

Emertainment Monthly had the privilege of speaking with the Marble Hornets members after their press junket. They’ve enjoyed working with Doug Jones on the upcoming movie inspired by their series, and said that the film team has gone “above and beyond,” asking for input and giving them the opportunity to read the script. The film’s release date (previously set for Spring 2014) has been pushed back due to reshoots of material and a renewed focus on promotion. Currently, the members are planning on using their funds from the KickStarter (a total of $67,000 after fees) they created to produce Blu-rays of Marble Hornets’ third season to fund their next two series. The trio is interested in sticking to the horror genre for at least one of their two shows, which may or may not be filmed as found footage, but it will not in the same style as Marble Hornets.

During the Marble Hornets Q&A session, the trio answered fan questions and showed a short clip of the upcoming film. Several of the questions centered around the behind-the-scenes work in the series, like the famed atmospheric set locations, the issues of found-footage filming, and character designs. Check out Emertainment’s footage for the panel and the press junket: