After becoming the biggest Kickstarter funding draw ever for a horror features, “Shelby Oaks” certainly evinces popular YouTuber Chris Stuckmann’s love of the genre. But while imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, it isn’t necessarily the most rewarding for others to watch. This mix of found-footage, missing-person, demonic-possession and other stock narrative hooks too often feels like a compendium of ideas from other movies Frankenstein’d together, with too little effort put towards finding a personality of its own.
In theaters from Neon on Oct. 24, over a year after premiering at 2024’s Fantasia Film Festival, the film should scare up decent interest from fans eager for Halloween season thrills. But it’s not a terribly promising, let alone memorable, start to what one assumes is intended as a franchise. Instead it feels more like the kind of watchable but mediocre entry you typically get when a series runs out of creative inspiration.
Stuckmann began posting film reviews on YouTube in 2009, racking up over two million subscribers while gradually moving more towards an identity as a filmmaker himself. Though his online presence demonstrates a wider viewing range, “Oaks” has the deja vu air of someone who’s watched almost nothing save fairly mainstream horror their whole life. Which is not an inherently bad thing… but, as yet, this writer-director hasn’t developed the style or finesse to make well-worn ideas feel fresh again.
The opening stretch here is in faux-documentary mode, as we get the mysterious backstory on one Riley Brennan (Sarah Dunn). With three friends, she had a YouTube channel dubbed “Paranormal Paranoids” where they investigated alleged supernatural phenomena. Its modest following often dismissed those posts as fakes, presuming the quartet staged spooky stuff for clicks. But that attitude changed when all four disappeared in 2008, while staying overnight in a titular Ohio ghost town not far from their homes. There is extant footage of a Riley in a room, terrified by loud noises just outside, then never returning after she tremulously dares to investigate.
The mutilated bodies of her three companions are eventually found. But 12 years later, her own fate remains unknown — a source of fascinated public speculation, and personal obsession for Riley’s older sister Mia (Camille Sullivan). The latter is just wrapping up a related interview when there’s a knock on her door. Upon being greeted, the disheveled man outside abruptly shoots himself in the head. It emerges he’s an ex-con who’d been incarcerated at Shelby Oaks’ sinister, now-shuttered penitentiary. He dies clutching a video Mia decides to keep and watch, rather than surrendering to police. That cassette makes it clear that the disturbed Wilson Miles (Charlie Talbert) played some unpleasant role in whatever happened to Riley and company.
Yet Mia isn’t convinced he committed any dire deeds alone, per se. To the dismay of her husband (Brendan Sexton III), she fixates on finding some deeper, yea darker truth — one suggesting a supernatural evil behind not just her sister’s disappearance, but once-populous Shelby Oaks’ slow extinction.
There are decently unsettling moments as Mia’s quest leads her to poke around a decrepit former amusement park, the empty prison and other sites. But we never feel anything more than routine genre buttons are being pushed as she suspects something lurking in the shadows behind her for the 90th time. And it’s downright silly when she is menaced by glowing-eyed “hellhounds.”
While the filmmaking itself is not atmospheric or distinctive enough to help, a core problem is that Stuckmann’s script (from a story conceived with wife Samantha Elizabeth) comes off as a checklist of horror conventions rather than something that’s building its own original mythology. It’s hard not to groan upon discovering these events take place in “Darke County,” or hearing the humorlessly cornball dialogue that guest-star actors Keith David (as an ex-warden) or Michael Beach (a police detective) get stuck with.
None of this is boring, but it is perilously generic. Things do get more interesting when Mia stumbles upon an improbable house in the middle of the woods, occupied by a witchy old lady (Robin Bartlett). But this climactic sequence, too, is redolent of too many other films to name, as is a final stretch where the apparent resolution to the sisters’ travails turns out to be something else.
Starting off with quasi-found footage, the movie initially asks its performers to convince as “real” people caught on camera — a ruse that doesn’t work, then hobbles the cast from convincing us once “Oaks” adopts a more conventional storytelling style. It’s not really their fault that they fail to sell material that demands near-constant expressions of fear, yet almost always feels like formulaic second-hand goods.
Presumably the involvement of executive producer Mike Flanagan kicked up overall polish a notch or two. The results are respectable given budgetary limits. There are passable jump scares, plus some quease-inducing locations, effectively exploited by production designer Christopher Hare and cinematographer Andrew Scott Baird. A loud score attributed to both James Burkholder and The Newton Brothers keeps telling us to be very, very frightened. Still, while diverting enough as a whole, “Shelby Oaks” feels too much like horror cosplay to truly get under the skin.
