July 9, 2025 • 9 mins
Do you like scary movies? Are you frightened by the length of your Netflix queue? Good news - I've got you covered. Every week, I'll preview new and resurrected horror movies dropping on Tubi, Shudder, Netflix, Hulu and more, plus reviews of my favorites. This time around, I outline the show and share three of my top four on Letterboxd, plus a little about me and the struggle to pick number four.
Regular episodes begin on July 18.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Do you like scary movies?
(00:04):
Do you enjoy sitting in front of yourtelevision screen on a Friday night
looking for scary movies to watch?
Instead of scrolling through
Hulu,
the becomes a treadmilland you fall asleep
(00:26):
on the couch?
No, of course not. Nobodydoes. Nobody likes that.
That is the stuff ofnightmares. So good news,
I got your hookup toall the grizzly horrors,
creeping monsters and slashing killers,
(00:47):
lurching onto streamingservices every single week.
This is the killer here.
(01:23):
So my name is Marcus Funk.
I am a lifelong monster andsci-fi horror movie fan.
The X-Files and Jurassic Park were my jam.
It got me hooked young and I watchedGodzilla and the Creature from the Black
Lagoon and all the old classicmonsters and later sci-fi originals,
always reliable and theasylum in all of its glory.
(01:45):
And truth be told just about anythingthat stomps or creeps or slithers,
I'm there. I'm a big fan. I've alwaysloved what I call the fox Mulder moment.
When somebody spooky or weirdor crazy explains the big
bad in a horror moviethat's been offing people,
when the thread bear plausibility ofthe fictional horror thing you've been
(02:08):
watching touches real life folkloreand mythology and science in
history,
when it feels much more like somethingnot beyond the realm of extreme
possibility. That momentwhen life finds a way.
After grad school, I had more time torelax and expand broadly into horror,
(02:28):
and around 2016, I decided, Hey,you know what? Everything's crazy.
Horror movies are going to be agreat drug of choice and a fun hobby.
I started getting into podcastingaround the same time, and here we are.
I'm also a doctor, but notthe kind that helps people.
You may call me the doctor if you insist,
but only if you use a bogus easternEuropean accent like in the burbs,
(02:52):
which is one of my alltime favorite movies.
I'm an associate professorof mass communication at Sam Houston State University
in Huntsville, Texas,
where I teach journalism andpodcasting and media literacy.
I research podcastjournalism and digital media,
and I help keep our curriculumupdated and current.
We try to stay on the cuttingedge as much as possible.
(03:13):
All of that is really hard to do. It'sdifficult to teach and it's challenging
to study if you're not alsoactively doing it yourself on at
least some level.
I've had hobby podcasts with friendsin the past that were a lot of fun,
and I produce a podcastcalled Structurally Sound with Friends in our College of
Criminal Justice, but nothingout of class that's fully mine.
(03:38):
And I'm a journalist.
I get weirdly uncomfortable ifI'm not putting out some kind of
news into the world, contributingsomehow to the marketplace of ideas,
and in this case,creepy, stabby, slithery,
zeitgeist that's all around us.
So I'm going to host a 15 to 20minute podcast about horror movies,
(04:00):
hitting streaming servicesthat particular week.
Big ones will probably usually beToby Shutter, Netflix and Hulu,
but I'll try to cover the others as well.
Not VOD, not Video onDemand and not cinemas.
Lots of other people are already talkingabout those. It's much more crowded
market, a lot more noise, and my wifeand I have a two and a half year old.
(04:24):
We don't have time to sneakoff to the cinemas very often.
We do have plenty of time to sit onthe couch after the kid finally goes to
sleep. So hitting streaming,that's doable. Cinema,
it's just down the block, but itfeels miles away at this point.
Not only that,
but there's something about scrollingthrough Tubi and Shutter Tubi in
(04:47):
particular for whatever reason,
but it reminds me of walkingup and down and back and
forth through the aisles atBlockbuster when I was a kid.
I loved doing that.
I love just soaking in that atmosphereand that smell and looking at all
the VHS covers and then laterthe DVD covers. I loved it.
(05:09):
I've actually still got my old Blockbustermembership card issued in Kerrville,
Texas incidentally. So my heart reallygoes out to everybody in the hill country
right now,
but I've got old Blockbustermembership card issued on Junction
Highway in, I want to say1997, maybe even earlier.
And I bought a blockbusteruniform, a fake one,
(05:31):
but a costume version online.And so for Halloween this year,
I'm going to put the membershipcard. I've got it in a lanyard.
I'm going to wear that withmy uniform and some khakis,
and then my wife is going to put zombiemakeup all over me and I'll go teach
classes. Undead, blockbuster.
It's going to be so much funalready looking forward to it.
I've used that costume in thepast and it's always ahead.
But the thing about Blockbuster wasthat sooner or later you had to pick
(05:55):
something. You couldn't justwander around endlessly.
There was a time limit. Sooneror later you had to grab a movie,
get some popcorn or a snack and go home.
None of that really applies withstreaming. There's no hard deadline.
There's no closing time,
(06:16):
no salespeople encouraging youor giving you recommendations.
Nobody's going to kick you out the door.
You could scroll ceaselessly endlessly,
terminally forever anda day until hell freezes
over and the devil himselfbuys a parka, wanders up,
feeds your cats, sits next toyou on the couch, stares at you,
(06:38):
and begs you to just pick something.
And even then, what are you goingto do? You've been trying, right?
You've been scrolling andscrolling and scrolling.
What one more person telling you to picksomething that's not going to make a
difference? That drives me nuts.
So I'm going to spend a few minutes everyweek talking about new and resurrected
(07:01):
scary movies, dropping on streamingservices and reviewing some of them.
The show is also on Letterboxed,
and you're probably wonderingwhat are your top four and, well,
three of them are really easy for me.Hands Labyrinth,
which I maintain is Guillermodel Toro's best film,
although there are strong argumentsfor some of his other flicks,
the vast of night,
which is criminallyunderrated and frankly,
(07:24):
Samuel l Jackson's best movie of all time.
And that's Deep Blue Sea, and Icannot wait. Roz, our daughter,
is two and a half right now,
and I cannot wait until she's old enoughto see this movie because that scene
with Samuel L. Jackson and thescene I'm talking about already,
that is going to blow her mind. Maybethe best speech in movie history.
(07:45):
It's still a few years away, butI'm excited. The fourth one though,
number four on that list, I am reallystruggling. I've thought a lot about this.
It's taken more time,winnowing down this list,
more brain energy than it did toplan the entire rest of the show.
Maybe the burbs, maybe Godzilla,minus one, minus color,
(08:06):
maybe bone tomahawk, maybe Sister death.A girl walks home alone at night,
Tucker and Dale verse, evil cabinin the woods, the last matinee.
I cannot decide.
And that gives you a sense too,not just of me and my taste,
but the breadth of the show becausethose flicks are all over the map,
(08:28):
literally and figuratively, andI'm excited to talk about 'em,
and I hope you'll join me. Newepisodes drop every Friday,
starting July 18th. I'll beon Apple Podcasts, Spotify,
and wherever else you get yourpodcasts. At some point in the future,
I'm probably going to expand intoTikTok and YouTube, but for now,
(08:48):
we're going to keep it audio. Thanks.
Do you like scary movies?
(00:04):
Do you enjoy sitting in front of yourtelevision screen on a Friday night
looking for scary movies to watch?
Instead of scrolling through
Hulu,
the becomes a treadmilland you fall asleep
(00:26):
on the couch?
No, of course not. Nobodydoes. Nobody likes that.
That is the stuff ofnightmares. So good news,
I got your hookup toall the grizzly horrors,
creeping monsters and slashing killers,
(00:47):
lurching onto streamingservices every single week.
This is the killer here.
(01:23):
So my name is Marcus Funk.
I am a lifelong monster andsci-fi horror movie fan.
The X-Files and Jurassic Park were my jam.
It got me hooked young and I watchedGodzilla and the Creature from the Black
Lagoon and all the old classicmonsters and later sci-fi originals,
always reliable and theasylum in all of its glory.
(01:45):
And truth be told just about anythingthat stomps or creeps or slithers,
I'm there. I'm a big fan. I've alwaysloved what I call the fox Mulder moment.
When somebody spooky or weirdor crazy explains the big
bad in a horror moviethat's been offing people,
when the thread bear plausibility ofthe fictional horror thing you've been
(02:08):
watching touches real life folkloreand mythology and science in
history,
when it feels much more like somethingnot beyond the realm of extreme
possibility. That momentwhen life finds a way.
After grad school, I had more time torelax and expand broadly into horror,
(02:28):
and around 2016, I decided, Hey,you know what? Everything's crazy.
Horror movies are going to be agreat drug of choice and a fun hobby.
I started getting into podcastingaround the same time, and here we are.
I'm also a doctor, but notthe kind that helps people.
You may call me the doctor if you insist,
but only if you use a bogus easternEuropean accent like in the burbs,
(02:52):
which is one of my alltime favorite movies.
I'm an associate professorof mass communication at Sam Houston State University
in Huntsville, Texas,
where I teach journalism andpodcasting and media literacy.
I research podcastjournalism and digital media,
and I help keep our curriculumupdated and current.
We try to stay on the cuttingedge as much as possible.
(03:13):
All of that is really hard to do. It'sdifficult to teach and it's challenging
to study if you're not alsoactively doing it yourself on at
least some level.
I've had hobby podcasts with friendsin the past that were a lot of fun,
and I produce a podcastcalled Structurally Sound with Friends in our College of
Criminal Justice, but nothingout of class that's fully mine.
(03:38):
And I'm a journalist.
I get weirdly uncomfortable ifI'm not putting out some kind of
news into the world, contributingsomehow to the marketplace of ideas,
and in this case,creepy, stabby, slithery,
zeitgeist that's all around us.
So I'm going to host a 15 to 20minute podcast about horror movies,
(04:00):
hitting streaming servicesthat particular week.
Big ones will probably usually beToby Shutter, Netflix and Hulu,
but I'll try to cover the others as well.
Not VOD, not Video onDemand and not cinemas.
Lots of other people are already talkingabout those. It's much more crowded
market, a lot more noise, and my wifeand I have a two and a half year old.
(04:24):
We don't have time to sneakoff to the cinemas very often.
We do have plenty of time to sit onthe couch after the kid finally goes to
sleep. So hitting streaming,that's doable. Cinema,
it's just down the block, but itfeels miles away at this point.
Not only that,
but there's something about scrollingthrough Tubi and Shutter Tubi in
(04:47):
particular for whatever reason,
but it reminds me of walkingup and down and back and
forth through the aisles atBlockbuster when I was a kid.
I loved doing that.
I love just soaking in that atmosphereand that smell and looking at all
the VHS covers and then laterthe DVD covers. I loved it.
(05:09):
I've actually still got my old Blockbustermembership card issued in Kerrville,
Texas incidentally. So my heart reallygoes out to everybody in the hill country
right now,
but I've got old Blockbustermembership card issued on Junction
Highway in, I want to say1997, maybe even earlier.
And I bought a blockbusteruniform, a fake one,
(05:31):
but a costume version online.And so for Halloween this year,
I'm going to put the membershipcard. I've got it in a lanyard.
I'm going to wear that withmy uniform and some khakis,
and then my wife is going to put zombiemakeup all over me and I'll go teach
classes. Undead, blockbuster.
It's going to be so much funalready looking forward to it.
I've used that costume in thepast and it's always ahead.
But the thing about Blockbuster wasthat sooner or later you had to pick
(05:55):
something. You couldn't justwander around endlessly.
There was a time limit. Sooneror later you had to grab a movie,
get some popcorn or a snack and go home.
None of that really applies withstreaming. There's no hard deadline.
There's no closing time,
(06:16):
no salespeople encouraging youor giving you recommendations.
Nobody's going to kick you out the door.
You could scroll ceaselessly endlessly,
terminally forever anda day until hell freezes
over and the devil himselfbuys a parka, wanders up,
feeds your cats, sits next toyou on the couch, stares at you,
(06:38):
and begs you to just pick something.
And even then, what are you goingto do? You've been trying, right?
You've been scrolling andscrolling and scrolling.
What one more person telling you to picksomething that's not going to make a
difference? That drives me nuts.
So I'm going to spend a few minutes everyweek talking about new and resurrected
(07:01):
scary movies, dropping on streamingservices and reviewing some of them.
The show is also on Letterboxed,
and you're probably wonderingwhat are your top four and, well,
three of them are really easy for me.Hands Labyrinth,
which I maintain is Guillermodel Toro's best film,
although there are strong argumentsfor some of his other flicks,
the vast of night,
which is criminallyunderrated and frankly,
(07:24):
Samuel l Jackson's best movie of all time.
And that's Deep Blue Sea, and Icannot wait. Roz, our daughter,
is two and a half right now,
and I cannot wait until she's old enoughto see this movie because that scene
with Samuel L. Jackson and thescene I'm talking about already,
that is going to blow her mind. Maybethe best speech in movie history.
(07:45):
It's still a few years away, butI'm excited. The fourth one though,
number four on that list, I am reallystruggling. I've thought a lot about this.
It's taken more time,winnowing down this list,
more brain energy than it did toplan the entire rest of the show.
Maybe the burbs, maybe Godzilla,minus one, minus color,
(08:06):
maybe bone tomahawk, maybe Sister death.A girl walks home alone at night,
Tucker and Dale verse, evil cabinin the woods, the last matinee.
I cannot decide.
And that gives you a sense too,not just of me and my taste,
but the breadth of the show becausethose flicks are all over the map,
(08:28):
literally and figuratively, andI'm excited to talk about 'em,
and I hope you'll join me. Newepisodes drop every Friday,
starting July 18th. I'll beon Apple Podcasts, Spotify,
and wherever else you get yourpodcasts. At some point in the future,
I'm probably going to expand intoTikTok and YouTube, but for now,
(08:48):
we're going to keep it audio. Thanks.
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