Years ago someone told me about the “Marble Hornets” videos on YouTube and that I needed to watch them. I knew the story of “Slender Man” but these videos still creeped me out. This is the “big-budget” followup to those online videos.
Milo and Sara are coworkers at the same news station. She is the reporter, and he is her camera person/video editor. They are doing a story, along with their new producer Dan, on the housing crisis and foreclosures in their area. As the team interviews a man whose job it is to go into these foreclosed houses and clean them out, they find a house that seems to be abandoned. However, this house looks as though the owners just walked out and left everything they had in the home. Upon further investigation, they find a box of old Mini-DVR tapes in a locked closet. Thinking that these tapes might show a more personal story of the family the crew decides to take them and scrub through the videos for more info.
Milo sits at his desk at work scrubbing through what seems like an endless supply of home videos from the abandoned house. He finds nothing interesting. That is until he comes across a tape where the husband and wife are arguing but strangely there is no sound. Milo continues to investigate the tapes and discovers that the husband is becoming more paranoid that someone is watching them. Milo soon sees what the husband was referring to and begins to have his own run-ins with the mysterious stalker. He informs his team of what is going on, and things only get worse from there.
I can’t say what it is about the YouTube series “Marble Hornets” that gave me the chills. Maybe it was the shoe-string budget and the way that everything felt… real. Maybe it was the clever way that they laid out the plot of each episode to draw you into whatever world they had created. Either way, it gave me goosebumps more than once. The theatrical adaptation/sequel of the story just didn’t hit me the same way. I guess it fell victim to the usual blocking and setups that Hollywood horror movies all have and I could see the tropes before they “got me”. The unpredictability of the YT series definitely kept me wondering what might happen next.
I will say this, I liked Always Watching. Sure it’s based on the over-used current trope of “found footage” but having the history with the YT channel somehow made that less of a thing for me. It uses a LOT of editing tricks (well really one) to add the scares in, but it makes sense in the “lore” of the story itself. With a cast of maybe 10 people max, Always Watching is one of those horror movies that makes me feel like I could make a movie in this day. It takes a little while to get going but is worth the watch. It’s like a more up to date Blair Witch. I would suggest that you watch a bunch of the Marble Hornets series first.
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