Alex and I went to college together. He was a film student, the serious kind — the kind who carried a camera the way other people carry their phone, who talked about Tarkovsky and actually meant it. He was working on a student feature in his junior year. He called it Marble Hornets. He never finished it.
He came to me near the end of the school year and he looked — wrong. This is the only word I have for it. Alex had always been intense but in a directed way, the intensity of someone who knows what they're working toward. What I saw that day was something else: scattered, hollow, the specific wrongness of someone who has not been sleeping and who is afraid of something they won't name.
He gave me seven boxes of tapes. Mini-DV, Hi-8, a few VHS. Years of footage. He said he was leaving town and he couldn't take them and he needed them gone and he needed me to burn them.
He made me promise to burn them.
I said I would.
I watched them instead. I watched them because I am weak-willed and curious and because Alex had never asked me for anything and the weight of the ask made me want to understand it.
For the first several tapes: nothing. Footage of the film in production — actors running lines, outdoor shots, interior scenes. The film looked good, actually. Alex had talent. The actors were finding something real in the material.
Then I found the outdoor footage from the second week of shooting.
Something is in the background. Not every shot — but enough shots that once you see it, you start looking for it everywhere, and you find it in places you initially dismissed. It is tall. It is thin. In most shots it is far enough from the camera to be indistinct — a figure in the tree line, at the edge of a field, behind a building. In one shot, it is closer.
In one shot, Alex is setting up a camera angle, walking through the frame to mark a position, and behind him, at the edge of the shot, the figure is visible. And it is close. And its proportions are wrong in a way I cannot precisely articulate except to say that if you look at it long enough you understand that it is not wearing a suit, that is not a tall man in a suit, that is something with the wrong number of things attached to it.
Alex doesn't see it. He's looking at his camera.
I went through every tape. I went through hours of footage, frame by frame in some sections. The figure appears in thirty-one shots across seven tapes. It is always in the background. It is always partially obscured. It is never on camera long enough to resolve clearly. Except in one tape — shot in a clearing in the woods, handheld, apparently by Alex himself — where it is visible for four full seconds in the center of the frame.
In that tape, Alex doesn't film it directly. He's filming the clearing, the trees, the quality of afternoon light through the leaves. But he panned too far to the right. He caught it for four seconds. And then he panned back, and you can see from the camera's motion — the jerk of the pan, the sudden correction — that he saw it.
He knew it was there.
He had known it was there.
The tapes are not burned. I'm sorry, Alex. Whatever you were trying to protect me from — I'm not sure the burning would have helped. I'm not sure the distance helped you. I've tried to find you to ask.
I am still trying to find you.
Entry 1. There will be more.