Taking A Closer Look

The next cut, It’s night and Alex is breathing heavily. He turns to see Gorr’Rylaehotep.

We’re left with a few short frames at the end of the video of him standing outside a window.

This is the first real...”attack” the entity mounts on either Chris or Alex in these videos. He makes his presence known, absolutely murders the digital footage, to the point where we don’t even know what’s going on at the end of the video, and scares the shit out of Alex. 

“Colligari” is next. Some say the sound in the video is modulated elephant roars, some say it’s the call of a whale. "Colligari" translates roughly as "to be gathered together" in German. It can also be translated as "to be tied together" or "to be harvested together". There’s a picture of the Engraved Hourglass Nebula zooming in and the faint, almost unreadable text saying “Prepare yourself for the coming of the Fourth Dawn”. He links to his blog in the description.

It hasn’t been touched in seven years. The Engraved Hourglass Nebula seems to represent the idea of a “dimensional hourglass” that can be used in a highly complicated process to make a Rift between the 3rd World (ours) and the 4th World (theirs). You can read more about it in the Black Book. 

In any case, if he left the Order, why is McComber putting Order dogma on his blog? Scrolling through it all, it’s mostly just countdowns to the “First Cycle”. I don’t remember what that means, if I ever did. All this stuff happened a long time ago, and it’s kind of a blur. I’m going to ignore the blog. There’s nothing interesting to be found there.

The next two videos were very difficult. Chris, Alex, their friends Matt Sharky and Jesse Laurenzi arrive at Greg’s house with some other friends for a party, but Greg isn’t answering the door and his lights are all out. Alex takes Chris aside and they wonder if something bad has happened to him. After a cut, the two decide to break into his house to see what’s going on. Alex points out that Greg’s dad has been away for an extended period of time, and that Greg only ever saw McComber and Gorr’Rylaehotep when he was alone. Jesse rejoins Alex and Chris and helps Alex to lift Chris inside the house. Suddenly, the window slams shut behind him, so hard the glass cracks.

Chris tries to unlock the front door for the rest of the visitors, but it’s stuck. Alex and Jesse both deny shutting the window. Some say it was probably Jesse that did it, but I find it hard to believe Alex wouldn’t notice. Chris goes deeper into the dark house to try and find Greg, trying light switches that refuse to work. He searches the entire house before trying the basement. Buzzing starts to hum over the audio track as he gets closer to the basement, and reaches a crescendo when he finds Greg’s disembowled corpse on the floor. Chris panics and tries to leave, but Greg’s murderer, Gorr’Rylaehotep, is waiting for him on the basement stairs. 

The next video is the events from Alex’s perspective. After helping Chris through the window, he tries to explain to Jesse what’s been going on, before being called by Chris over back to the cracked window. They talk to Chris a bit more, who retreats back into the house to find Greg. Alex goes back to trying to explain things to Jesse, who mounts an incredibly unconvincing reaction to his story. 

Chris doesn’t come back for a while, so the entire group outside the house break down the door and try to find him. Alex approaches the basement door and gets the same buzzing noise, and finds Greg’s body. He begs his friends to call and ambulance, and finds Chris in a different part of the Basement, unconscious yet with eyes fully open. Jesse throws up in a toilet, and the video ends.

Of course, as we all know, Jesse locked Greg in his basement to be served up to his god like a main course. The fact that he was able to come back to Greg’s house and pretend to be none the wiser is absolutely insane to me, and really speaks to how brainwashed by the Order he must have been. To stand there and lie to your supposed best friends like that? To commit the act in the first place? How can you truly believe you are doing the right thing while taking such actions?

Evidently, Alex pulled the rather cheap-looking mask off the man during the chase. Or perhaps, he tossed it voluntarily, hoping it would help lose Alex.

There’s another cut. Chris is calling for Alex, wandering the streets of his New Jersey town, trying to find his friend. There’s another cut, probably just for time. Suddenly, we get a different kind of audio/visual distortion. A deep rumbling sound, and the colours trending towards yellow-red. It’s very brief, but almost immediately after it ends the volume increases heavily and the picture blurs as Chris raises the camera from facing the ground to in front of him. The blur disappears as fast as it arrived, and the contrast is blown way out when he points the lens towards the first appearance of Gorr’Rylaehotep in any of their videos. (besides his hand, if you count that) The distortion is only brief, however.

He seems taller than what I’ve seen in both Noah’s videos and on the EverymanHYBRID channel. Chris seems to pause for a split second when he sees him, then starts shaking in fear, turns around, and runs away. The distortion returns when he runs, both visual and audible. The same deep, rumbling sound.

The next cut is Chris in an unnamed friend’s car. He thanks him for the lift and they attempt to find Alex together. It doesn’t take long before they can locate him, and they pull over to find him severely out of breath. Alex says he lost him, and that he tried to take off his mask. Note that he says “tried”, which makes me think the cultist DID discard his mask willingly. 

They drive along where Alex saw the cultist flee and find a lake. Assuming he swam across the lake and got away, they decide to call it a day. Chris brings up the tall, faceless, suited man he saw, and the pair return to the site above where Chris found him. Of course, he’s vanished, and so has the car he was standing behind. Chris insists that he’ll just show Alex the video rather than tell him. 

Log #12 goes up another week later. Alex and Chris are going to their friend Greg’s house, and Alex complains about Chris bringing his camera, but Chris insists that he never be without it. Greg lets them in and asks the old proverb, “why do you have a camera?” There is a distinct buzzing when Chris crosses Greg’s threshold, but it fades when he enters.

The next few cuts are mostly of just casual conversation with a few spots of strange silence on the audio track until Alex and Chris decide to leave. They say their goodbyes and leave the house, and are still chatting happily when they reach the road and spot Kind von der Ritter across the street from Greg’s house. 

There’s another slight spot of silence on the audio track, and when sound returns Alex and Chris are trying to decide what to do. Alex tells Chris they should “rush him” because of their numbers advantage, and Chris replies that they “don’t know what he can do, though”. There seems to be a slight cut. Alex asks Chris what he wants to do, and Chris decides to simply approach him. The low buzz from earlier fades back into the audio track. The two approach McComber, calling out to him. Chris wonders aloud why he’s not saying anything, and the screen’s contrast gets blown into black, white, pink and purple. Alex asks what he wants, and Marc McComber pulls a knife from the front of his robe.

The buzzing becomes a loud hum that takes over the entirety of the camera’s audio. Chris spins around and the pair immediately run from McComber. They knock on Greg’s door in a panic and quickly explain the situation. They lock the house and attempt to call the cops. The phone doesn’t work, and neither do their mobile phones. Greg then brings up that he thinks McComber has been following him too. He asks if the guy has a “white face” and the two confirm that is the man outside.

There’s a cut, and they flee to Greg’s basement. They lock the door to the basement, and Greg tries to explain, but just as he says “I’ve...for the past-” there’s a cut. Suddenly he’s telling them to calm down and asking if Alex is okay. They check the windows and there’s another cut. Greg is talking, saying “if he wanted to hurt me, I’m sure he would have....done it already.” Apparently his stalker has been around his house. They hear a noise upstairs and the buzzing returns when Chris points the camera up. This happens twice, and Chris gets Greg to confirm that the doors are locked.

Chris then mentions to Greg that the “same guy” has been following them too, and Greg tells them he hasn’t seen their youtube videos. Chris points the camera at the entrance to the basement twice more, and gets the buzzing distortion both times. Alex begs him to turn off the camera, and there’s a hard cut. They’re agonizing over what to do, and the buzzing returns very briefly, twice. They try to grab some makeshift weapons and make their escape. As they face the basement entrance, the buzzing gets incredibly loud. They count to three, open the door, and storm the house. They find nothing, but Greg’s laptop distorts and plays the same buzzing noise that was on the camera’s audio, and they flee through the front door.

Despite what Greg and the pair were saying, I don’t think Greg was being stalked by Kind von der Ritter. Rather, they were confusing him with Gorr'Rylaehotep, who had been following Greg, and using descriptors such as “white face” to accidentally confuse the two. While the pair had mostly only encountered McComber and a few Order members that were interested in the Oracle’s activities, Greg had seen their God around his house several times. In fact, when we review his own recordings later on, more light will be shed on his situation. 

I’d also like to mention the suited, masked cultist from Log #11. From the little research I’ve been able to do on the Order, this outfit is not really one of their practices. I’d be willing to dismiss it as a rushed mask for someone who was already wearing a suit for their job if he hadn’t also worn it in the previous video. It seems this cultist liked dressing up in a similar fashion to the god he worshipped. This type of thing seems like something the Order would find offensive, as if it were mocking their god. As we don’t see this person in a later video, at least, not in the same outfit, it wouldn’t be out of the realm of possiblity that he was punished for his actions. Whether that means they killed him or merely reprimanded him, is completely unknown.

Distortion seems mostly logical in these videos. Seems to occur on a directional basis, when Chris moves the camera in the direction of some entity. Its possible Kind von der Ritter broke into Greg’s house to follow Chris and Alex, but I find it unlikely. Given the intense humming sound and distortion on Greg’s Macbook screen, I want to guess at the presence of Gorr'Rylaehotep somewhere in the house.