A first feature from critic Chris Stuckmann, Shelby Oaks is a mixed blessing – it might be baked into the premise or it might be that the relatively new phenomenon of kickstarting for a budget from small investors means putting effort into a sizzle reel rather than a script but the movie is stuck with lurching from one overfamiliar sub-genre set-up to another several times.
It starts out like a found footage film: a documentary crew interviews Mia (Camille Sullivan), sister of the long-missing Riley Brennan (Sarah Dorn), one of a quartet of podcasters known as the Paranormal Paranoids who disappeared in the abandoned, probably haunted town of Shelby Oaks twelve years ago. We get background on Mia and Riley, with stories of the younger sister’s persistent night terrors as a child (involving a man at her window), and some Blair Witchy business which is neatly assembled but makes this about the thirtieth paranormal-podcasters-get-got picture down the pike.
After a reel of this, the format changes (along with screen size), something major happens on Mia’s doorstep, and credits cut in – the effect is so jarring I assumed for a moment we were watching a new film within the film, presenting a fictional film version of the story seen the found footage segment, but no it’s the actual film and we continue in regular narrative form, albeit with a few docu-segments thrown in. A couple of mystery threads are pursued, which lead to at least two terrific locations – an abandoned prison and an abandoned amusement park – which hold clues to the haunting and the disappearance. Then, Mia – who is so obsessed with her presumed-dead sister her husband (Brendan Sexton III) is fed up with the drama and annoyed by their failure to start a family of their own – hares off on fool’s errands a couple of times, rushing alone into scary places on the thinnest pretexts like the stupidest had-I-but-known heroine in horror films of yore.
Possible solutions are hinted at, but what we get in the last act are one of my least favourite circa 2010 horror film tropes combined with a sustained variant on a particular horror classic which has already had two theatrical reimaginings this year with yet more on the horizon (including an official reboot). Despite its wayward nature and ‘oh come on now’ moments, Shelby Oaks has some big pluses – Sullivan is excellent in the lead (Durn, in a smaller role, gets a lot of mileage out of being haunted) and there’s a terrifically creepy late-film turn from Robin Bartlett as an ambiguous old woman who seems to be the sole resident of the abandoned town (though, you might quibble that the character being called ‘Norma’ is one more extraneous callback to yet another genre classic).
It might not even matter that the film is an inconsistent, frequently irritating mess because it is quite scary – I always cite Eurotrip as an example of a comedy which isn’t that clever, is obviously cobbled together in the edit and is wildly tasteless but is consistently funny so you have to rate it a success. Shelby Oaks is massively derivative, trips over its own story, includes at least one element guaranteed to infuriate audiences, and is queasily fixated on a JD Vance-like attitude to woman’s worth … but its cracked windows, overgrown fairground attraction, decaying prison cells, sudden reversals, and shock/surprise moments are genuinely frightening.