Shelby Oaks fumbles Chris Stuckmann's collection of horror references

Shelby Oaks is the highly anticipated debut film from Chris Stuckmann, the film critic and YouTube sensation who has parlayed his love of genre film (and his many subscribers, via Kickstarter) into bringing this story of revenge and redemption to the big screen. Promising to tap the font of found footage films from the ‘90s and 2000s, as well as a myriad of occultist horror and thriller flicks from the ‘60s to the ‘80s, on paper there’s plenty here to pique the interest of genre fans and general audiences alike. Unfortunately, even taking into consideration the fact that this is a first time filmmaker, the result is a mass of half-baked ideas and poorly executed tonal shifts, squandering the promise of its early premise and devolving into a middling mess.

The film opens with Mia (Camille Sullivan) being interviewed for a documentary about her younger sister Riley (Sarah Durn), one of four paranormal investigators that disappeared under strange circumstances in 2008, unleashing a media storm and eliciting the fanatical support of a nascent online community seeking answers to the mystery. The group’s last images were captured in Darke County in the abandoned Ohio town of Shelby Oaks, where a dilapidated prison and rotted-out amusement park provide the last known whereabouts for this intrepid team. This promising conceit is spelled out in a pre-credit sequence, situating the narrative within a true crime-like idiom that’s allowed to develop considerably before both the tone and the aspect ratio shift. 

Shelby Oaks is certainly handsome: Cinematographer Andrew Scott Baird’s photography captures the dilapidated environs as well as the lo-fi, mini-DV aesthetic in compelling ways, and Christopher Hare’s production design is equally rich in palpably moldy, dank detail. There’s also something pure about how the early days of online video making are employed here, and Stuckmann’s experience in this arena is illustrated in ways both overt and subtle. These are by far the most effective and, frankly, exhilarating moments of the film, reminding of the analytic specificity of David Fincher’s Seven, or even Brett Morgen’s June 17th, 1994 with its brashly constructed media montage. It’s clear that someone well-versed in the intricacies of online life over the last few decades is at the helm of this telling, and it’s easily the most accomplished part of Shelby Oaks’ presentation.

The film also provides a mix of references, but from the outset the most obvious connection for its shtick is the massively influential Blair Witch Project. The idea of being lost in the woods, with the events captured entirely on handycam, felt truly groundbreaking in a world before ubiquitous mobile phone cameras. Yet some of the primary satanic children birthed from Blair Witch’s success were the “barfcam” flicks. Eschewing tripods and/or narrative cohesion just to appear edgy, these follow-up films gleefully abandoned long-established formalism for the chaotic brand of the new. Meaning to instill an adrenalized rush, sweeping motion blur and staccato, machine-gun editing took advantage of newly minted non-linear computer editing, resulting in found footage gold rush. Shelby Oaks draws (at least initially) far more interesting lessons from Blair Witch’s dark tale.

By using the framework of documentary filmmaking, a thriller such as this immediately gains a sense of narrative seriousness, encouraging audiences to drop any cynicism and buy into the truthfulness of it all. In ways both narrative and stylistic, Stuckmann’s film owes as much a debt to Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s Paradise Lost: The Child Murders At Robin Hood Hills, the documentary about the West Memphis Three that were accused of performing a ritualistic murder as part of a real-life “Satanic Panic.” With its sweeping helicopter shots of the areas where the crimes took place, and series of compelling talking-head interviews that provided deeply disturbing details about events that many interpreted to be an insidious institutional acceptance of a convenient yet false narrative, the sense of uncovering deeper, hidden truths was fundamental to its impact. It’s no small irony that Berligner would go onto direct the meta-film Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2.

Early on, Shelby Oaks follows Paradise Lost’s lead with a dash of the meta-textuality of Book of Shadows, mixing these verisimilitudinous ingredients with astute recreations of early internet discourse, from MySpace to YouTube comments. Shelby Oaks hints at an army of amateur anonymous sleuths activated by a story they’ve become obsessed with, becoming parasocially connected to online personalities. And then, the film becomes far more conventional, far less interesting, and far more unintentionally silly. By hinting at the larger scope, and then narrowing it so forcefully, things quickly go awry.

Publicists for Shelby Oaks asked reviewers not to overtly discuss any major plot surprises, and fair enough. Still, one can’t pretend that the promise of Shelby Oaks’ setup isn’t squandered after a relatively short period of time. Instead of what looks to be a compelling storyline involving the public’s vicarious fascination with horrific events, the rabid nature of amateur online sleuthing, and the frustration with police procedures that hinder rather than foster justice, Shelby Oaks simply follows a single character as she tries, alone, to get to the truth about what happened to her sister. This is a textbook example of an original aesthetic proving too limiting to provide the kind of generic thrills that the film is going for; instead, the film devolves into a straightforward and boring tale, one that even the marketers are loath to admit to.

Your patience for this tonal shift may vary, and it may come down to how much you enjoy people choosing to go to darkened, spooky places at night rather than, say, waiting until daylight or calling a friend to help, only to walk slowly and portentously while carrying ungainly flashlights that (shockingly!) are soon to fail at an inopportune moment. Or perhaps you adore when the image on screen zooms into a darkened space, while the audience holds their breath until the score provides a klaxon blast, the sonic equivalent of “Please experience a jump scare here.” Perhaps you are not dulled at experiencing the same thing repeated several times with diminishing returns.

On top of this, if you’re going to focus so intently on one protagonist out to show everyone around her that they’re wrong and she’s right, you’re going to need someone able to play both manic and sympathetic, wry yet emotionally wrought. Camille Sullivan’s tics are not up to the task. Her obsessiveness may be justified given the circumstances, but Mia’s poor decisions seem driven not by psychological reasons but by screenplay convenience. The drive for going it alone is not only unearned, it’s the cause of the film’s most patently ridiculous moments, where contrivance after contrivance is piled so that the character, and thus the audience, is led to where a film of this nature is meant to be. Mia’s relationship with her husband (played by Brendan Sexton III) is meant to provide some deeper meaning, but his emasculated gormlessness borders on the risible, another ineffectual character unable to make the most simple of efforts that would in turn get in the way of the film’s trajectory.

There’s a cinematic cliché that when critics try to become filmmakers, they throw all that they’ve seen into their works, leaving the sensation of a series of references rather than a whole. Some, like Peter Bogdanovich, Paul Schrader, or Jay Cocks, manage the transition well, wearing their references on their sleeves but still managing to go beyond mere pastiche. Others like Brian De Palma made a career out of mimicking his heroes, while the magpie-like Quentin Tarantino, never formally a critic but certainly of similar persuasion, atomizes everything from the overt to the esoteric to make a cloud of references so dense that under its own weight it forms something new and luminous. While Stuckmann mines everything from Rosemary’s Baby to The Omen, it’s only in the early sequences that he seems to actually do anything with these elements, and soon it all becomes bogged down by the necessity of sating the expectations of horror movie fans rather than subverting them. Worse, by relying so heavily on these references, Shelby Oaks becomes entirely predictable, so that when the emotional shifts occur they feel less thrilling than intended.

In fact, Shelby Oaks is chaste throughout, limiting how truly macabre Stuckmann is willing to go. Sure, people die, and some blood is spilled, but there’s a general reticence to truly go all out, neutering the evil and making even the most brutal moments feel tamer than they should. The descent into occultist elements feels more like a heavy metal rock video than intended, and any actual barbarity is shown with a tactfulness that goes against the film’ sordid premise. On the one hand, we’re asked to take seriously the emotional beats, from marriage strife to the connection between sisters, and then on the other, to accept its gritty shift by simply turning off our brains and going with the genre-fueled flow. The swing between the truthfulness of the early elements and the preposterousness of the latter is jarring and, in turn, disappointing. There are hints that Stuckmann could pull off Shelby Oaks’ magic trick—not just rehashing more of the same but taking a more ruminative look at the nature of the found footage genre itself. But, no, we get a film where people need to make stupid decisions to be in stupid situations with clearly telegraphed results, all to provide a simple jolt rather than to truly take seriously the actions of these characters. There are broad gestures towards understanding the deep emotional and physical violence at the heart of the tale, but we’re left glancing furtively into the abyss rather than truly staring into the ominous eyes that look back from the dark. 

Director: Chris Stuckmann
Writer: Chris Stuckmann
Starring: Michael Beach, Keith David, Sarah Durn, Brendan Sexton III, Camille Sullivan
Release Date: July 20, 2024 (Fantasia Film Festival)