Director: Chris Stuckmann
Writer: Chris Stuckmann
Stars: Camille Sullivan, Michael Beach, Sarah Durn
Synopsis: A woman’s obsessive search for her missing sister leads her into a terrifying mystery at the hands of an unknown evil.
The landscape of the YouTuber or content creator to filmmaking pipeline has been a fascinating one to witness over the past few decades. From shameless quick cash-ins like the Fred movies to more successful ventures in quality, like the recent surge of the Philippou brothers with Talk to Me and Bring Her Back. What I find most interesting about it, however, is the variation of creators; people like Philippou just got their start making silly short-form skits on their channel, which acts as a completely different voice of experience compared to Chris Stuckmann and his very first feature film, Shelby Oaks; which went from a Kickstarter lead project to a now Mike Flanagan-produced movie being distributed by Neon.
Stuckmann has always adored film, and before his channel also got its start making home movies of his own, the influence of his love for film and love for all things horror specifically oozes all over Shelby Oaks. From its creative blend of documentary and found footage filmmaking to the great use of creating tension through dark spaces and restraint from typical jump scares, it’s clear that Stuckmann has an eye for direction and knows how to craft a compelling image even with limited resources. However, the clear inspirations Stuckmann has as a fan of the horror genre also hamper its effectiveness as the film goes on. What starts relatively fresh slowly forms into a culmination of horror conventions and messiness that leads to a final feeling of dissatisfaction within its final reveals. It leads to Shelby Oaks being a fine but frustrating debut feature; one that has more than enough promise to prevent it from being a totally empty experience, but also a film that struggles under the weight of all it’s clearly influenced by.
Shelby Oaks starts within a documentary-like format, following the story of Mia (Camille Sullivan) and her search for her now long-lost sister Riley (Sarah Dunn). Before her disappearance, Riley made a channel of her own with three of her friends entitled “The Paranormal Paranoids,” and they were famed for their exploration of the paranormal and whether their encounters with the supernatural were real or not. Things took a turn for the worse when, after exploring the abandoned town of the titular Shelby Oaks in 2008, all three of Riley’s friends were brutally murdered, and Riley herself is seen in video footage going into a room and seemingly disappearing out of thin air. With her faith in law enforcement low and her husband, Robert (Brendan Sexton III), doubtful of her ideas, Mia puts it on herself to find her missing sister and learn of the evil secrets that have been circulating around them both since her youth.
The clearest appeal of Shelby Oaks from the get-go is its loving mesh of found footage and documentary-style horror filmmaking, and it’s a creative way for Stuckmann to make use of limited resources, while also adding to the film’s terror. The Blair Witch Project inspirations lurk all over the camera work, with a constant sense of always feeling like something is there that you aren’t seeing, or a relentless ambiance of scrappy camera movements and cracked windows that matches well with the film’s entire tone. It isn’t just the presentation that keeps Shelby Oaks initially creative at first, but Stuckmann’s direction behind the camera always keeps things from being completely boring within more familiar territory. He particularly has an understanding of when to use restraint during a scare, but also how to use the quiet stillness of the dark to a horror film’s advantage when it comes to the placement of the camera while setting up tension.
Where Shelby Oaks starts to unravel is when it consistently falls into becoming a mesh of overused horror film beats from its inspirations, rather than the more inspired and unique sensibilities it initially possessed. A lot of the reveals near the movie’s climax are often more satisfying not only because of its similarities to other recent genre fare, but also because of its loss of any creative builds of tension that it initially started with. Even for the fair amount of scenes that are genuinely well done throughout the film, others are more silly than scary when the film decides to play with the more demonic forces in the narrative.
This messiness continues to reside within the screenplay as well, with over-explanations of certain supernatural plot points. Even the main characters themselves are a bit underwritten here. While there’s obviously a fair amount to be learned about them from the documentary portion of the film, there was never a moment when I could feel like I knew them, and rather, the movie was just telling me what I should know about them. This issue mainly resides in the character of Mia, specifically here, where, despite Sullivan’s solid performance, she is only ever defined by her looking for her sister.
Shelby Oaks has so much passion at its core, and you can see its director bursting at the seams with his love for horror and found footage, but the film struggles to carry the weight of its ambitions under genre conventions that can leave it more stale than fresh. However, even if it is an imperfect debut at its center, it shows promise of more inventive fare yet to come from Stuckman rather than middling genre fare.
