Shelby Oaks

When Riley Brennan (Sarah Durn) — the host of the online ghost hunting show Paranormal Paranoids — disappears while investigating the mysterious abandoned town of Shelby Oaks, Ohio, her older sister Mia (Camille Sullivan) obsessively searches for her. The deeper Mia goes, the more she uncovers not just about Riley’s disappearance, but also about a supernatural presence that dates back to their childhood.

You Got Stuckmannized: Following a recent line of YouTubers that have progressed into horror features like Michael Shanks and the Phillipou Brothers, Shelby Oaks is the directorial debut of popular YouTube film critic, Chris Stuckmann, whose YouTube channel amassed 2 million subscribers and over 789 million views since 2011. As someone who watched Stuckmann’s videos as a teenager starting their journey into filmmaking and film criticism, it’s a wonderful full-circle moment to be writing a review of a film made by someone whose film reviews inspired not just me, but a generation of cinephiles. This admiration for Stuckmann’s work was reflected in the film’s Kickstarter campaign, crowdfunding $1.39M from over 14.7k backers, the most ever for a horror project on the platform.

More Imitation than Homage: Having spoken so passionately about horror films in his videos for over a decade now, it’s very clear what works Stuckmann has drawn inspiration from with his debut feature. But he wears his influences a little too heavily on his sleeve in Shelby Oaks. Stuckmann shows great skill at establishing and maintaining a brooding, melancholic atmosphere and eerie tone that naturally ratchets up the tension, but gets overshadowed by an aimless, lacklustre script that feels like someone hit shuffle on a playlist of horror cliches. Shelby Oaks is rife with extended sequences reminiscent of films like Lake Mungo, The Blair Witch Project, The Ring and deploys almost every spooky motif from the horror film arsenal, aimlessly wandering from one from cliche to the next; an abandoned amusement park to haunted prison; a found-footage camcorder tape to ritualistic pagan symbolism; a creepy old woman in a cabin in the woods to a mysterious demonic presence.

Lacks an Identity of its own: Stuckmann feels so indebted to the iconography and the conventions of the horror genre that Shelby Oaks never truly rises above it and establishes an identity of its own. The film confusingly pushes the more compelling themes and ideas that are more personal to Stuckmann to the wayside. Stuckmann was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, and the character of Riley was largely inspired by his own sister, who was excommunicated by his church and didn’t see him again until many years later. Mia’s grief and anguish of separation from her sister and the desperation to find her is the thrust of the film, and while it gives it urgency and brings out a great performance from Camille Sullivan as Mia, it is never truly explored to the depth that it should to have the full emotional weight Stuckmann clearly wants it to have.