This looks like it has something to do with the upcoming HBO vampire series True Blood. My bud Devin from CHUD.com has informed me there is an HBO series coming soon called True Blood and one of the plot points of the story is the creation of a synthetic blood called “tru blood” which allows vampires to reveal themselves to the world now that they no longer have to prey on humans.
This aligns with the quote I found buried on Revenant.com:
“Thank You For Answering The Call And Joining Us.
But What It Means To Us Is Almost Beyond Words.
Tru Blood can sustain us. The Bonds of Blood Will No Longer Hold Us Hostage.”
And it also aligns with the mysterious initials “T B” that are in the letter below.
Nothing remains a mystery long on the internet. 
Original post follows…
Ok… now either this is the start of some new, clever viral marketing campaign for a movie that’s coming out soon – or I’m embarrasing myself by posting up something I received in the mail that’s totally unrelated to any movie at all.
I’ve been wracking my brain trying to figure out just what the item I received today in a translucent envelope really is. The only vague clue is the inclusion of the initials T.B.
For more information and pictures of what I received, read on.
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Below you’ll see everything I received today. It was addressed to me personally with no mention of Screen Rant and was postmarked New York. You can see the packaging is quite fancy (and I would say expensive) including a heavy black envelope that was sealed with red wax bearing the mysterious T.B. once again.
For any of you that may be good at decoding or cryptography here’s a detailed look at the “writing” and the odd symbol in the message that was inside the black envelope:
So… this is either:
A. Something really obvious related to some movie that I’m totally missing the boat on.
B. Something that’s actually tricky to figure out and related to some movie.
or
C. Something totally unrelated to any upcoming movie and I’ve just revealed some weird piece of mail from some unknown stalker, fan or lunatic to tens of thousands of people.
My first thought was that it might have something to do with the upcoming film The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, based on the look of the symbols.
Update 1:
Ryan from ShockTilYouDrop.com found this website: Chishio.jp which has more and similar items and the same logo seen above. The last time there was a viral site with a Japanese domain it was courtesy of J.J. Abrams and had to do with Cloverfield…
Update 2:
Apparently the symbols above are Egyptian (a friend of Ryan’s received the same letter and had it analyzed by UCLA’s language department!) so it may be Mummy 3 related, but I’m also thinking it might have something to do with the Street Fighter movie? Of course that’s still nine months away from opening so the Mummy flick is more likely.
Update 3:
Other people/sites who have received similar letters:
JHutchins.net – The official site of novelist J.C. Hutchins
YesButNoBtyes.com – A self-described pop culture blog.
Cactus Pix – Describes itself as a “Motion Picture Company.”
The registry info says it was registered on March 27th of this year. It’s not owned by any studio.
Update 4:
Thanks to the decoding skills of some of the folks over at Unfiction.com the following website has been uncovered: RevenantOnes.com. There is a countdown timer on the site set to expire at 7PM Eastern Standard Time tonight.
The domain was registered on February 13th of this year but they’re using privacy to mask the ownership. “Revenant” means “a person who returns as a spirit after death” or a corpse that returns from the grave, aka: a zombie.
There is also a forum that is not yet accessible on the site called the Trublood Forum. And I was able to locate the following phrase:
Thank You For Answering The Call And Joining Us.
But What It Means To Us Is Almost Beyond Words.
Tru Blood can sustain us. The Bonds of Blood Will No Longer Hold Us Hostage.
I also discovered there will be the following areas:
Political
Leaders
Integration
And here’s an image buried on the site:
So what do YOU think?
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81 Comments
If Vic doesn’t mind of course, here is the new topic about the mysterious letters. Some things are starting to be made solid.
http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=25684&highlight=chishio
Guys, let’s try to centralize this investigation… it seems pretty scattered among blog comment boards and such. I started a thread on an ARG / viral site:
http://www.immersionunlimited.com/index.php?topic=2900.0
First off let me say I know nothing about ancient languages and this is all based on stuff I found on the net.
The first letter is definitely Akkadian Cuneiform, all but 2 of the symbols can be found on this page. I had a heck of a time wringing anything out of it though. I tried using phonetic and logograms, nothing.
The second letter is probably Hieratic, some of the symbols can be found here. Seems only about half the symbols are on that page, best I found for it though.
The third letter was called Greek by the linguists at UCLA so I won’t argue, but it seemed like some of these symbols were also on the Hieratic page (but sideways?).
The fourth letter appears to be Ugaritic or Sumerian according to UCLA.
Finally, I strongly believe this is a viral marketing (or ARG?) campaign for The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, for 2, admittedly circumstantial, reasons. There is a prequel/sequel something or other in the works for the movie called The Scorpion King: Rise of the Akkadian. Second the mummy movie is mentioned on the Hieratic site and all of the languages seem to originate from that area.
Could the reason for it being on a Japanese site be because Jet Li’s character Emperor Han is Japanese?
I’ve added a screenshot from one of the Google ads linking to the Japanese site onto my myspace blog. The ad appeared on Horror.com
Also, Andrew Kasch of DreadCentral.com has also received a letter.
View the latest here: http://www.myspace.com/jameszahn
You humans are soo weak!! I sent all these letters just to show how pathetic you petaQs are!! The language is ancient Klingonese, around the time of Kotar, the first Klingon, after he killed the gods!! His heart….
Kahless, would you go and eat a book or something! Geeez!!
)
Looks like this may indeed be about the next Mummy movie. As others have said, there is Japanese on it, and the next Mummy movie is about a Japanese emperor.
Of course, you can always believe that Romulan posing as a Klingon.
QI’yaH!! Qovpatlh!! Hab SoSlI’ Quch!!!
Now, now, Kahless. Calm down before you burst one of your backup blood vessels.
)
Something about this doesn’t make sense to me, why make a viral marketing/ARG that only a handful, at most a couple dozen, linguists can decipher?
The rosetta stone theory is a good idea, and I have noticed similar themes in some of the letter’s (water and snake, but that could just be the prevalence of those words/symbols) but it would require us to be able to understand one of the four and then use that and one of the other letters to translate something else entirely. So that’s out for now.
I also tried a substitution cipher for individual symbols that got me nowhere. But there are too many and varied symbols, especially in the first letter, for this to make sense. Also I have a funny feeling the letters all say the exact same thing or are similar anyway.
My latest attempt is taking the Ugaritic, which is the only one I can find 100% of the symbols for, and translating it to letters, then words via https://listhost.uchicago.edu/pipermail/ane/2004-November/015436.html
My result (broken up by the ‘ in the letter):
snake water “tied bag” manacle
manacle head thread
court door breast
water eye snake
court door breast
crook eye house door signature
eye crook snake
eye door
eye crook water
If you get really creative you can tell a story with it or something
:sigh: This is getting mildly frustrating but it’s still fun, there MUST be more clues out there for us to discover yet.
I have it on fairly good authority that this is not related to Mummy 3.
Someone over at Dread Central mentioned the possibility of Hellboy II, but after talking to one of my online movie buddies I’m starting to think this may be the effort of someone or a couple of someones to get some buzz going for some off-the-radar project.
If this was for a major motion picture it would have certainly been mailed to more movie news sites than just mine and I don’t think it would go to Hutchins and a couple of the other recipients.
Although it’s still certainly interesting and fascinating, I’m suspicious of who may really be behind this. Not too many people online have my physical mailing address but I suppose it wouldn’t take much detective work to dig it up.
Vic
Vic,
You’re suspicious of their motives, or you have actual guesses as to who may be behind it? If you have guesses please share
Also it didn’t take much (less than 5 minutes) to find your address online (I assume it’s you) is this your house number: 1172?
Azure
P.S. it also said you’re 45-49 years old
lol
How many of the recipients are subscribers of Fangoria? My husband is a subscriber… (he’s an aspiring screenwriter, which I hardly think makes him worthy of notice from someone trying to promote a film)… anyone else?
Azure, nice work. I’ve pretty much shared all my guesses. I *could* be totally off track but I’m kind of wondering if J.C. Hutchins is behind this (he was the first to post about it, had a bunch of hi-res images on flickr AND a video up the same day) along with perhaps one of the other recipients trying to drum up interest in some project.
Again, if this was viral for a major movie it would have had a lot wider distribution.
And no, I don’t subscribe to Fangoria.
Vic
bummer, another pet theory shot to heck. I’m sure a lot of those will go down in flames over the next few days…
That’s disappointing that it’s not a major movie or something, other’s have mentioned the possibility of a video game but that looks unlikely too at this point.
I think you might be right about JC, a lot of people on his site seem suspicious of him, and I found this in the contact section of his site:
“~ I am a shameless (but tactful) self-promoter.”
Well, we’ll see about that I guess
Yeah… we’ll see.
Hey Azure, did you get my email?
Vic
A friend of mine got a copy of it too – the cuneiform one. He’s a fangoria subscriber, but of no stature whatsoever in the mass media world. (Although he does run the communications department for a local school district… HMMMMM…..)
Odd, odd…
New developments in this investigation are taking place here:
http://www.immersionunlimited.com/index.php?topic=2900.msg21984#msg21984
Screen Rant & others: Please provide your input!
Rob, really? Now that’s interesting… A lot of folks seem to have a Fangoria connection, but not all of them (like myself).
Vic
Yeah. He also dug this up:
http://www.ancientscripts.com/ugaritic.html
(For the cuneiform letter)
It still doesn’t translate into anything useful, and not all the letters are in their chart.
Figured I’d post this little url from: http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=25684&start=30
Looks like a couple of people over there have gotten the URL: http://revenantones.com/ from the superimposed letters on the seal.
When the site is visited in Firefox, the TB logo, found at the bottom of the letter appears as the favorite icon. Also there is a countdown on the site, that will end in a little under six and a half hours.
I googled “revenant ones” and found this among the top hits.
http://www.revenantmagazine.com/
It’s not necessarily related, but it does tie in with the horror genre.
Stark.
(oops, forgot to hit tab…)
“Curse you Mandarin!” -Stark (The Real One)
“Curse you Mandarin!” -Stark (The Real One)
Bummer that we have to wait 5 hours for something to be revealed… I’ll be at happy hour. No way I’m missing sake bombers to hang around my computer! Hopefully someone will post, if anything exciting happens!
I dug up some big info from that site, updated the post above.
Vic
nice work, vic! very mysterious…
Wow – I’ve been on the road for the last 6 hours and lots has happened.. this is cool / intense! Can’t wait.
Well if anyone wanted to put out a strange letter and see if it would get any hype, we now know that it works.
I see a new trend in online marketing unfolding here.
I sure wouldn’t be surprised if this gets very anti-climatic.
Mystery solved! See the top of the post.
Vic
If these are done right 790 – with the right amount of suspense, intriguing potentials and an intelligent approach to the frame work, these things can not only be a great marketing tool, but fun for everyone involved..
Face it, we all love a good puzzle with a Sci-Fi ending, now don’t we?
A vampire show.
Neat…..O,
Vic, you should autograph that letter and put it up for bid on Ebay.
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