When’s the last time you embarked on a multi-movie marathon, either in the same day or consecutively? That’s what we asked our team:

Justin: It’s been a little while since I last did a true marathon — spring 2023, in fact, when I chain-watched all five Phantasm flicks one after the other. It was actually some pretty good times right there and scratched some longstanding curiosity I held for that series. As a bonus, while the sequels did eventually suffer some decline, it was never that steep or severe, probably because the same guiding hand was involved in all of them.

I’m probably due to tackle another series. Any suggestions?

Anthony: I’ve been working nights for over 19 years, and for a number of those years my shifts were so quiet that I eventually found an online friend who also worked nights, and we would keep each other company on Skype while watching movies or TV shows. It was an awesome night when we checked out the pilot for a terrible 1990s late-Saturday night show called Acapulco H.E.A.T.

So one year we had a marathon of non-horror movies we felt were a strangely good fit for Halloween. We started with some of our favorite episodes of the original Twilight Zone (I chose The Monsters are Due on Maple Street, she chose the Talking Tina creeper), followed up with Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, then the original The Wolfman, and finished with Escape From New York.

A good movie marathon isn’t just what movies you select but who you watch it with, when, and how. I had the great privilege of watching those awesome movies, weird as they may sound for that specific holiday, with one of the best friends I ever had, out of my own dark basement (I was working from home before the ‘demic, folks).

Sadly, in recent years I haven’t had the kinda time that allows me to do that sort of binge watching, but should I do it again I would do it the same way, co-watching online with friends, having selected the strangest kind of titles for the occasion. Any takers? Halloween will be upon us before you know it, you guys!

Sitting Duck: It was more of a rally than a marathon. However, my one-episode-a day viewing of Mystery Science Theater 3000 in production code order (which resulted in my MST3K Journals) was a unique experience. Not only did it result in me finally checking out the last few episodes I never got around to seeing, but seeing it (mostly) in order really allowed me to see how the show developed in a way that wasn’t possible from randomly grabbing discs from the shelf and popping them into the DVD player.

As for an actual marathon viewing, my last one was when I watched Samurai 7 in one sitting. But that was over a decade ago, before the binge viewing model was a thing. Truth be told, I no longer have the endurance for that sort of tomfoolery.

Drake: So back when we were first married, my wife and I lived in south-facing apartment in California that had no air conditioning and virtually no air flow. On sunny days it could get miserable. And so on an especially hot summer Saturday, we found a theater showing a triple-feature. We couldn’t get in the car fast enough.

Now I don’t remember what the first movie even was, but the next two were Psycho II and Psycho III. I get that the movies had a so-so reception, and they’re in no way in the class of Alfred Hitchcock’s original film, but on the other hand the theater was big, nearly empty, and most importantly, air conditioned. And that memory of sitting in a cool theater for several hours and avoiding the heat outside gives the Psycho sequels a bonus star in my book.