Shelby Oaks

Twelve years ago, the members of a popular YouTube channel dedicated to all things spooky and ghastly, the Paranormal Paranoids, went missing. In the years since their disappearance, they’ve become legendary across the internet. There are channels dedicated to studying every piece of video evidence in existence, scrutinizing every minutiae, pontificating about the “real” story, like the armchair experts that they are. Meanwhile, the real police admit that they’re baffled by the story and have zero leads, zero ideas, and no clue as to what happened. All that they’ll say is that they’re stumped and scared.

Riley (Sarah Durn), the leader of the Paranoids and the most popular member, is the subject of most of the fervent debate online. She recorded a video in the moments before his disappearance, a chilling premonition of what was awaiting her. And now, in the present day, her sister, Mia (Camille Sullivan), is being interviewed for a documentary that’s exploring the facts, the legend, and the legacy of the disappearance of Riley and her team of paranormal investigators. As their interview session wraps for the day, an unknown man knocks on the door, introduces himself, hands over a MiniDV cassette tape, and promptly kills himself.

Mia doesn’t tell the police about the tape. Before she hands it over, she decides that she needs to see the footage for herself. What she sees is the stuff of nightmares—Riley’s team being slaughtered and Riley herself being abducted. Mia is terrified that with this new footage, her sister’s reputation is going to be dragged through the mud all over again. This twist in the legend of the disappearance will amount to nothing but their lives being upended, again, with no resolution in sight. So, she decides to investigate herself, and winds up stumbling into a dark secret that’s haunted her family for decades.

Shelby Oaks was written and directed by Chris Stuckmann in his feature debut and was produced by Mike Flanagan, who is a fan of the horror mockumentary Lake Mungo. Shelby Oaks and Lake Mungo share some thematic similarities, exploring generational trauma through the lens of supernatural horror, with a framing device that allows characters to speak more openly and directly to a camera, subverting a need for creating excuses for exposition, because it doesn’t break the film’s logic to speak so openly about the past, the present and the future that they fear. Sadly, though, Shelby Oaks is no Lake Mungo. Shelby Oaks has a handful of effective scenes, some moments of genuine terror and excellent suspense, but it often shows its hand to the audience too much or devolves into supernatural silliness.

When Shelby Oaks works, it’s terrific. I believe there’s probably an excellent film hiding in there somewhere, surrounded by a series of unfortunate scenes and reveals that don’t work. It often feels like there are two films (beyond the split narrative vehicles) that are at odds with each other. Stuckmann has shown a lot of promise, however, and I believe that he has the potential to hone his craft into something really spectacular. He just needs to trust his audience a little more, to allow the fear that he creates to percolate in the shadows, and resist the temptation to shine a light on it.

Vital Disc Stats: The Blu-ray
Shelby Oaks comes to Blu-ray in a single-disc release, housed in a standard case, with the same creepy poster artwork from its original theatrical release. The cover image represents Riley in the midst of a digital/video glitch.

There are two visual aesthetics to Shelby Oaks: A found-footage style horror movie and a more traditional narrative. The found-footage stylings embrace a kind of simulacra philosophy, where the horrors from beyond our realm are so terrifying that they can’t even seem to be directly recorded by video devices. They’re rendered pixelated masses, with a vague shape of terror. The traditional narrative still shoots these horrors from the shadows, but they’re clearer in their presentation.

Shelby Oaks is presented in 1080p high-definition from an 8K video source, and all around looks great for what it’s trying to accomplish. It’s not the best-looking movie you’re ever going to see, but for a movie that toes the line between documentary, narrative-driven horror, and trying to bridge the divide between these ideals, it does a great job. Shadows are thick and inky black, skin colors look healthy and vibrant, while the color palette itself tends toward molding grays and browns, as though the town of Shelby Oaks is a short drive away from Silent Hill.

Like its visual counterpart, the sound design for Shelby Oaks honors its two divided aesthetics with unique presentations. The found-footage segments are relegated to the front of the soundstage, while the traditional narrative segments utilize the entirety of the soundstage, from front to rear—although, on both, the musical score is allowed to transcend the boundaries of the found-footage front-end.

The sound mix is encoded in DTS-HD MA and is, from end to end, terrific. It packs a wallop when it needs to, when it has a stinger of a jump scare to blast out, or needs to be more subtle in mounting tension. The sound design is very clever and well-implemented, with crystal clear precision through its various effects, and in how it favors dialogue throughout, even in its more chaotic moments.

While Shelby Oaks doesn’t completely run corollary to my pet peeve to modern releases—that, outside of boutique releases, modern physical media lacks an offering of decent supplemental features—it does offer significantly more than most. We have a robust offering of bonus episodes of the fictional “Paranormal Paranoids,” a making-of divided into parts, and an audio commentary from writer/director Chris Stuckmann.

• Audio Commentary - Chris Stuckmann
• The Making of Shelby Oaks (HD 26:32 total, in six parts)
• Paranormal Paranoids Episodes (SD 40:16 total, in four parts)
• Crime Scene Gallery
• TV Spots
• Trailer

Shelby Oaks seems to work better as a demo reel for writer/director Chris Stuckmann than as a complete film. It never quite comes together in a totally satisfying way, which makes the bummer feel more real, because it comes so close, in its best moments, to being something really special. Beyond his long history as a YouTube film critic, Stuckmann has a knack for creepy imagery and mounting dread, but when it comes to plotting and scripting, it feels too blunt and obvious. Boasting decent video stats, a terrific audio mix, and some great supplements, Shelby Oaks is 100% Worth a Look for what it succeeds at.