‘Shelby Oaks’ REVIEW: A Familiar Vision of Horror
‘Shelby Oaks’ REVIEW: A Familiar Vision of Horror
Camille Sullivan as Mia Brennan Walker in Shelby Oaks / Photo courtesy of Neon
Warning: Spoilers for Shelby Oaks
Journalist Murray Kempton once described a critic as “someone who enters the battlefield after the war is over and shoots the wounded.” I grew up watching Chris Stuckmann’s movie reviews on YouTube, and without him, I may not be writing this review today. More than any opinion he held about a film, I always found his desire to make his own films to be inspirational, and I saw in him a career path that I might one day be able to follow. Though he continues to review films, Stuckmann has stopped reviewing films he didn’t like, citing his difficulties making Shelby Oaks and the long, arduous process that all filmmakers go through, no matter the quality of the result. He joined the ranks of the wounded, and I take little pleasure in entering the battlefield after the war.
The film’s opening shot is reminiscent of the movie reviews that critic-turned-writer-director Chris Stuckmann made all these years on his YouTube channel. Unfolding at first like a documentary, we see what is supposedly the last known clip of Riley Brennan (Sarah Durn), an online paranormal investigator whose disappearance catalyzes the film, sitting center-frame in a plain, ordinary room, looking at and talking directly to the camera. It’s the same style that Stuckmann uses in his videos, especially in the early days of his channel. Without the benefit of the high-definition cameras, microphones, lights, and the meticulously organized sets and backdrops at the disposal of content creators today, the early days of online videos had people filming in a room in their house that could be a room in anyone’s house, with whatever lamps and lights they had at their disposal, in low standard definition quality.
Anthony Baldasare as Peter Bailey, Caisey Cole as Laura Tucker, Sarah Durn as Riley Brennan in Shelby Oaks / Photo courtesy of Neon.
The non-descript room and the fuzzy video quality cast an eerie atmosphere that hangs over the found footage parts of the film like a shadow, and sets it in a specific time, when online video platforms had just taken off, and anyone with a camera could point and shoot. Riley’s disappearance attracts the true-crime-brained and amateur detectives on the internet who are quick to make their own videos discussing every possible angle, some crying hoax, others forming a cult-like fascination with Riley and her show, Paranormal Paranoids. It’s in this faux documentary section of the film, the first 10 to 15 minutes, that feels the most in Stuckmann’s wheelhouse and a compelling iteration on the found footage genre. As part of the online film community that popularized the video review format, he should know better than most just how the internet can latch onto something and never let go.
There isn’t much to glean from Riley’s final footage, as she tearfully monologues about feeling as though she’s being watched, then steps out of the room and into the darkness, fading into the black of the doorway, never to be seen again. Stuckmann, long a proponent for the kind of horror that lurks rather than jumps out from the dark, doesn’t cheap out with a jump scare and trusts that several uncut minutes of a distressed character, unknowingly about to walk to her demise, is far more unsettling. Perhaps even more terrifying is the way her life and her show become objects, a morbid fascination to be debated and broken down online.
Still from Shelby Oaks / Photo courtesy of Neon.
One of the documentary’s subjects is Riley’s sister, Mia. 12 years after Riley’s disappearance, Mia still holds out for hope that one day they can be reunited. That hope arrives on her doorstep as she films her part in the documentary, but it comes in the twisted, demented form of a man who cries out, “She finally let me go”, and commits suicide in front of her, leaving only a mini-DV tape and more questions than answers. Rather than hand over the tape to the police, Mia hides it and plays it for herself. Stuckmann’s found footage segments fare better than when he’s operating in a more formal style.
Where the formal style does its best to be invisible, in found footage, there is a much more tangible and literal perspective. Somebody has to be holding the camera. At one point in the mini-DV tape footage, the camera switches hands, and it takes on the voyeuristic quality of a predator stalking its own prey, watching, unblinking. One of the most unsettling shots in the entire film is of the camera simply trained directly at the abandoned cabin that Riley and her co-hosts are holed up in. It’s ominous not for what’s in front of the camera, but because of who is behind it.
Sarah Durn as Riley Brennan in Shelby Oaks / Photo courtesy of Neon.
Once it leaves the realm of found footage, the film struggles to gain momentum. Mia tries to investigate Riley’s disappearance on her own, but the steps she takes to do so feel less like a natural progression of the story and more like a clunky way to keep the film moving forward. When her investigation leads her to an abandoned prison, it’s unclear what she intends to gain by breaking into it in the middle of the night, and how what she finds leads her to the next location. A common criticism of horror movies is that the characters act questionably, often putting themselves in terrible situations. I don’t usually mind, because if everyone behaved in the most logical, ideal way possible, there would be no movie. But Shelby Oaks sometimes strains credulity. The prison is a very imposing location, illuminated mostly by the moonlight shining through barred windows, casting long shadows across the walls, and it makes a lot of visual sense why you’d want a sequence to take place there, but its connective tissue to the rest of the story is as thin as actual tissue.
When the film finally arrives at the titular location, it’s a letdown. The town of Shelby Oaks is a few cool locations cobbled together, but it doesn’t have a character of its own. There are some woods, an abandoned amusement park, and a couple of houses. It’s empty because it’s supposed to be a ghost town, but it doesn’t really feel like there’s anything lingering behind anyway, not the atmosphere of decay nor the feeling that there was even something there that was once alive. Stuckmann can put together a scary sequence, drawing tension from a pitch black hallway or from what may lie behind closed doors, but what actually comes out of the dark and what unfolds behind closed doors isn’t anything we haven’t already seen before. Horror can be an avenue for some of the freshest voices in filmmaking, and Shelby Oaks, while solid in its own right, just isn’t quite that.
‘Shelby Oaks’ is now showing in Philippine cinemas.
