YouTube offers frights, entertainment

Ah, YouTube. Where would our generation be without it? We use it for music, movie trailers,… Ah, YouTube. Where would our generation be without it? We use it for music, movie trailers, viral videos and for seeing how long we can stand “Epic Sax Guy.” Oh, and cats. Thousands of cats.

But I see a great tragedy in this. YouTube should not be viewed simply as a dump of injury videos that we can show off to make our friends squirm. Users bursting with creative juices can take advantage of the video-sharing site to create features that defy traditional expectations of a video clip. Although they might not get as many views as the video of the baby panda sneezing, they can offer intellectual entertainment amid a sea of mindless vlogs and singing dogs. You just have to be able to find them.

Nothing scares the hell out of me quite like “found footage” paranormal “documentaries.” The “Marble Hornets” series is one of the best I’ve seen. It follows a film student sifting through the video from a project of a friend who had abandoned his work as he became increasingly mentally unstable. The story is skillfully unveiled through text that the film-student character adds to the video entries, which become more and more disturbing.

“Marble Hornets” is part of a larger mythos born deep within the Internet that features a creature/man called Slender Man. The creators — actually film students — were members of the forum that created the character. Knowing the mythos before viewing the series is not essential, but if you like it, you could do some more research and find much more similar stuff. Slender Man is very popular among paranormal fiction forums.

There are about 45 videos on the YouTube channel, MarbleHornets, that are dedicated only to this narrative. A new one pops up every so often, not on any apparent schedule. Even if 45 seems like a lot, don’t be intimidated — the videos range from a few seconds to about 7 minutes in length. And once you begin watching, every post seems brief because you become so engrossed in the mystery. I suggest setting aside some time and watching them all at once, because the suspense keeps growing.

One would think that entering the individually awesome terms “zombies,” “pizza delivery” and “YouTube” together into a Google search, you’d get a bunch of nonsense. But on the contrary, the formula reveals one of the most ingenious marketing endeavors to ever grace the Internet: the “Deliver Me to Hell” interactive zombie-movie adventure by the Hell Pizza franchise of New Zeland. The masterpiece can be watched on their YouTube channel, HellPizzaNZ.

In “Deliver Me to Hell,” the viewer makes the choices for a pizza delivery man who is trying to deliver a pizza to a stranded damsel-in-distress during a zombie apocalypse. As you might gather from such a ridiculous premise, the entire thing is a dark, hilarious joke.

Because the series is a choose-you-own-adventure story, only the first video can be found using a search. Otherwise, you’d be able to cheat. (That being said, you can still cheat by using the “back” button. But where’s the fun in that?). At the end of the first clip, you will be faced with two choices and, depending on which you choose, the site will link you to an unlisted video. Then the pattern continues. What you choose to do in each situation determines the video that comes next.

The production value is fantastic, and the series is great fun and has endless replay value. Thanks to my mad zombie-slaying skills, I made it through to the end alive the first time, but then played again and again trying to see how many different ways I could die. I only wish that I lived in New Zealand so that I could support Hell Pizza more by buying their food.

Enough of the paranormal. Video-sharing sites can offer you some real-word-applicable knowledge as well. On the YouTube channel Khanacademy, I found a new way to satiate my thirst for facts. This nonprofit project combines the ease of video tutorials with the abundant subject matter of sites like Wikipedia.

The self-proclaimed “world’s free classroom” has its videos organized neatly into playlists by subject, affording viewers easy navigation. There’s even a playlist on the most-infamously dreaded course among Pitt students: O-Chem. As I’m no chemist, that one doesn’t help me much, but I’ve learned other things from this fantastic channel.

I had no clue what the debt ceiling was and why politicians were fighting about it. So as I do with most everything in my life, I looked to the Internet, and the Khan Academy helped me understand what the issue is all about. Now I can not care about financial politics for reasons other than ignorance.

So there you have it, a taste of the deeper side of our beloved YouTube: filled with gooey film-artsy, innovative-markety, extra-knowledgey goodness. Happy screening, addicts.

Randi Alu exists only on the Internet. Follow @miss_batgirl on Twitter or email her at multimedia@pittnews.com for randomly computer-generated pop-culture references.