A funny thing happened to me on the way to O. I have a stack of DVDs and Blu-Ray for this project sitting on my Grail cabinet. What do you mean “What do you mean by Grail cabinet?” I have a Grail cabinet in my church. What do you mean “What do you mean by in my church?” Yeah, I live in a church. Look, I feel like we are getting bogged down in the wrong details here.

So anyway, my stack of movies. I have a few set aside for each letter. For O I was stretching things a little. One Hour Photo, but we will get to that below. Orphanage, and by that I mean The Phone, and by that I mean I streamed One Missed Call instead and then was confused when I saw One Missed Call still on my DVD shelf as opposed to on my Grail cabinet (Don’t ask, we aren’t going into that again. I explained it once already.) So I watched the wrong movie. But I like to lean into my mistakes (I call it leaning it because otherwise I might start questioning things and I really don’t want to fill up another Grail chalice with tears again.) I’m a bit behind on getting it posted, yes. And then I accidently watched another subtitled horror movie called Out of Darkness. So two out of three are subtitled and not what I planned to watch, and the other is One Hour Photo (look, It will make sense later. )

Maybe we should just get to it already.

Now in my defense here, I hadn’t watched this for awhile. And I remember it being much scarier. But Robin Williams is fantastic in this. He is a photo tech at Wal-Mart (ok, it has a different name, but we all know what it is.) And the manager of the store is none other than Gary Cole, my favorite evil sheriff from American Gothic (ok, some people know him as the manager from Office Space, yeah, he did that too. (But seriously, have you seen American Gothic? You will not think of the Andy Griffith show the same way again. Or Shaun Cassidy. )

Robin Williams is a single guy and a loner who lives vicariously through the lives of the families he develops pictures for. But when he takes it too far with one family, things get dicey.

And after watching it, I realize it probably fits a bit more into the world of thriller than horror movie. But that is a grey line. Take Criminal Minds the tv show. It is easy to say that is a thriller crime series, but many of the episodes cross the line into horror.

Robin Williams is creepy in this, and perhaps that has to do with the comedic genius wandering into a darker subject matter. So with this movie, lower your horror expectations and just go into it looking for a good movie. It hits that stride quite well, and is creepy.

In some ways this has a vibe close to the Ring meets Final Destination. It starts with a girl getting a voicemail from herself that is time stamped a few days in the future. When that moment comes, she dies. And a contact from her phone becomes the next one to get a phone call.

There’s a bit of a mystery surrounding why this is happening, but with so much of Japanese horror being supernatural in nature, I’m sure it won’t surprise you to find out …. it’s supernatural. And while we do find out the mystery behind it, it isn’t fully explained. I mean, Japanese ghosts are so powerful they can influence things anywhere. Making a fence break at a train overpass. An elevator door open before the car shows up. Just to name a few (And no, it isn’t because those are the only two I can recall right this minute, thank you very much!)

I am very curious to see where the second one goes. Then a mini series. Then a final movie.

I honestly just put it on because it sounded interesting, and then when I started writing this post, I realized it was on O movie. What are the odds? (Is it technically just under 4%? 26 letters and all that.) This movie gave me a slight Apocalypto vibe. It takes place 45,000 years ago. And the group we follow has a language they speak that, much like Apocalypto, is a dead language.

This small group is traveling, looking for a new place to call home. They run afoul of some sort of creature in the woods that begins stalking and hunting them down one by one.

The question arises about who are the monsters. Not in as elegant and amazing a fashion as Nightbreed did, but that is a high bar to try and clear. I will say that this was a more intriguing and interesting movie than I expected, but I literally knew nothing about it prior to seeing it on streaming and hitting play.

With these three movies listed here, I will say that if you can only pick one O movie to watch, it should definitely be Nightbreed.