It’s hard to imagine today, but there was a point where viral marketing campaigns for horror movies were a rare pleasure, and found footage horrors like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity truly cornered this promotional market. Shelby Oaks, the crowd-funded debut by YouTube personality Chris Stuckmann, follows in their footsteps in subgenre and advertising style. Riley Brennan (Sarah Durn), like many young female subjects before her, is a sweet young blonde who went missing alongside her cohosts – Laura (Caisey Cole), David (Eric Francis Melaragni) and Peter (Anthony Baldasare) – while shooting for their ghost-hunting YouTube channel, Paranormal Paranoids, in the titular deserted town. In order to create buzz, the Shelby Oaks PR team created fake Instagram accounts dedicated to posting clips of this supernatural show, encouraging audiences to search for clues months before the film’s release. And despite all of this effort exerted to drum up authenticity, Stuckmann squanders it all within the first twenty minutes.
I can pinpoint the exact moment where Shelby Oaks went catastrophically wrong. Like many of its ilk, the film begins with a collection of news clips and talking heads including a baffled detective, Burke (Michael Beach), and obsessive YouTubers following the case and honing in on Riley’s distraught sister Mia (Camille Sullivan), who after 12 years refuses to give up hope. As the documentary crew and Mia take a break from her confessional, the door bell rings and Riley’s kidnapper, Wilson Miles (Charlie Talbert), promptly shoots himself in the head on her doorstep while brandishing a new piece of the puzzle: a missing tape from Paranormal Paranoids’ final episode. It’s not so much the suicide that shocks, but the film’s immediate change in format. From here on in, any façade of archival footage is dropped and Shelby Oaks becomes your cookie cutter feature film, with a documentary-subject-turned-supernatural-detective at the centre.
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Given director Chris Stuckmann’s history as a YouTube personality devoted to reviewing genre films, it makes sense that Riley Brennan’s disappearance takes place in 2008, at the birth of the channel that began his career. However, it’s a shame how quickly he moves away from the early days of internet sleuths willing to scour footage and posit wild theories from the safety of their swivel chair. He chooses instead to focus on Mia, with many dull close-ups of her frightened face that pale in comparison to the snotty angles of The Blair Witch Project, as she continues the search for presumably dead sister. Shelby Oaks could have moved found footage into the current decade, but instead is closer to a late season episode of ‘Supernatural’, which is to say convoluted, lore-obsessed and overly sentimental.
Despite his commitment to the genre, what Stuckmann seems to have forgotten is that the magic of found footage comes in the moments where you’re forced to ruminate on the grainy shots of a shadowy figure in the background. It is through the genre’s limitations that our mind conjures horrors much worse than the CGI hell hounds that keep sniffing around in Shelby Oaks. Stuckmann’s debut may borrow from the found footage boom of noughties horror, but like many of today’s horror films, it suffers from explanation-fatigue. Stuckmann even shoehorns in a hag, making this hybrid horror yet another inauthentic, soulless, and easily-solved puzzle. There’s a very good reason why we never saw the Blair Witch, let alone learnt her entire back story, but maybe I’m expecting too much from a man whose criticism only amounts to calling films “so fucking cool”.