Shelby Oaks, or, Demonitized

Shelby Oaks was written and directed by Chris Stuckmann, who’s got a long-running YouTube channel where he reviews movies and occasionally does a video about topics related to filmmaking. He’s always earnest and enthusiastic, is always talking about his love of movies and wanting to be a filmmaker since he was a kid, and it’s just plain satisfying to see him get his first feature film made and released.

The movie was executive produced by Mike Flanagan. I have no idea how much he was involved with the actual production, but his influence is immediately evident in the finished movie. Not just for the glowing eyes all over the place, but for the fact that it’s a whole lot slicker and better-produced than it seems to have any right to be.

I’m going to avoid spoilers here, but I will skip ahead to the end of my review and say that I doubt Shelby Oaks is going to blow anybody away. But it absolutely holds its own as a mainstream horror movie, especially in an environment in which The Conjuring and Insidious became big hits. It’s got a great performance from its lead, it makes good use of its hybrid format, and it has some good spooky imagery, especially when it comes to spontaneously-cracking windows.

I call it a “hybrid format” since it’s not a found footage movie, even if it seems like it really wants to be at first. Shelby Oaks presents itself as a documentary about the search for Riley Brennan, host of a paranormal-investigation YouTube channel unfortunately called “Paranormal Paranoids,” who went missing along with the rest of her team 12 years ago while shooting videos in the abandoned town of Shelby Oaks, Ohio. There are clips from news broadcasts and other YouTube videos, including brief cameos from a few real-life YouTubers, and interviews with people familiar with the story. The focus of the documentary is Riley’s older sister Mia, who hasn’t given up on her search, even if the rest of the world has.

There are some creepy moments and jump scares in this portion, working exactly like found footage horror is supposed to, with creepy figures lurking in backgrounds that you have to rewind to catch, static cameras filming a person walking to their doom just out of frame, etc.

But a shocking incident happens during the filming of one of Mia’s interviews for the documentary, and that’s when we get a very nicely-done opening sequence, and the movie transitions into a traditional narrative. (Where we still get bits of the found footage style, but second-hand from watching Mia watching the footage).

It’s a good move, since even if found footage horror wasn’t way overdone at this point, there are real limits to how far you can go with it, at least if you care about plausibility at all. Shelby Oaks aspires to being full-on shocking, not just creepy or unsettling, and it wants to work like classic horror in its last half. Making it a “hybrid” lets it make the most use of both styles.

I have to say that the story is the weakest part, and it was too direct, without much subtlety, for my taste. Often you’ll get a stretch of dialogue that feels written instead of someone speaking spontaneously, and it doesn’t seem like the fault of the actor so much as someone trying very hard to get a script right. But performances are good overall, and it works well moment to moment. It moved quickly and never felt tedious, and I was intrigued by figuring out how things were going to fit together.

There’s not much levity in it — the only moment I can recall that felt intentionally humorous was when someone living in a dangerously run-down shack absolutely covered with black mold offers our protagonist a snack.

The funniest moment in the movie, though, is when we first realize that the EMTs didn’t bother to offer Mia a wet wipe or anything, and for some reason she’s decided she’s going to spend the entire day without washing her face.

It probably sounds like I’m damning Shelby Oaks with faint praise, or I’m grading it on a curve, but I really do want to see this movie succeed. I realize that almost every debut feature has the same kind of earnest enthusiasm and lifelong love of movies behind it, and it’s only because I’ve been seeing updates about the making of the movie that I feel invested in it. (Emotionally invested; the end credits have a very long list of people who helped crowdfund it, which does not include me, and I had to leave during the Cs to go to the bathroom).

But even if I weren’t rooting for it, I’d still say that Shelby Oaks holds its own. It doesn’t look amateurish or low budget, and there are some really novel images mixed in with the over-familiar ones. And it’s made well enough, and it’s engaging enough, that it took me a while to realize the story wasn’t working for me. I’m hoping Stuckmann gets the opportunity to build on this to make more stuff.