On the basis of Shelby Oaks, critic-turned-filmmaker Chris Stuckmann has seen a lot of horror movies, and he jams bits and pieces of every last one of them into his feature debut.
Not since James Wan’s original The Conjuring has a thriller so wantonly regurgitated tired tropes for scares, and unfortunately, the fledgling director exhibits neither the skill nor imagination to enliven his hodgepodge of old-hat devices. Save for a single sterling jolt, his compendium of clichés is a case study in knowing a genre’s tricks but doing absolutely nothing of interest with them.
Shelby Oaks, which hits theaters Oct. 24, begins as a found-footage affair concerning the YouTube series “Paranormal Paranoids” and, in particular, it’s most notable cast member Riley Brennan (Sarah Durn), who along with her pals David (Eric Francis Melaragni), Peter (Athony Baldasare) and Laura (Caisey Cole) were online sensations who visited creepy locales and had strange run-ins with supernatural entities.
An opening 2008 VHS clip of Riley freaking out in a cabin, pronouncing “I’m so scared,” is labeled by a text card as “the last time she was seen alive.” The ensuing action assumes a standard-issue true-crime guise, with on-camera chats with Riley’s sister Mia (Camille Sullivan) and Darke County, Ohio’s Detective Burke (Michael Beach) helping recount how, in the aftermath of this video, Riley and her friends vanished without a trace.
The site of their disappearance was Shelby Oaks, a ghost town that was abandoned following a late-’90s fire and rumored to be haunted. Snippets from “Paranormal Paranoids” indicate that Riley and company had a knack for up-close-and-personal confrontations with the unknown, and yet when they went missing, it was initially viewed as a hoax.
That notion was dashed, however, when they never turned up, and in an anguished interview, Mia is confident that her sister never lied to her. She reveals that as a child, Mia kept a “dream sketchbook” in which she drew her slumbering visions, including from her nightmares. Moreover, adolescent Riley was convinced that a man habitually stared at her through her second-floor bedroom window—a detail that’s related to Mia’s belief that, in Riley’s final video, she was saying (in distorted audio), “Mia, he’s back!”
(Warning: Minor spoilers ahead.)
Even once David, Peter, and Laura were discovered—their corpses left in a house whose front door was decorated with a bloody demonic symbol and the word “Tarion”—Mia remained hopeful that her sibling would be found. That optimism is rewarded, sort of, when during her present-day interview session with the documentary crew, a man appears on her doorstep, states, “She finally let me go,” and blows his brains out.
At this point, Shelby Oaks pulls its primary switcharoo, segueing to a more traditional cinematic form, but Stuckmann’s command of conventional big-screen storytelling is shaky, such that it’s not clear if his overwrought credit sequence (and the immediate events that follow) is being played straight or parodic. As it turns out, it’s the former, and the rest of the film is pitched in a similarly cheesy, melodramatic key.
In the hand of this deceased stranger, Mia finds a cassette labelled “Shelby Oaks,” and it contains outtakes from Riley’s time in the town. This passage concludes with the only jarring moment in Shelby Oaks, and it sends Mia on a research mission that provides her with information about the derelict prison Riley previously investigated, as well as “The Mark of the Incubus”—clues given greater context by a conversation with the prison’s warden Morton Jacobson (Keith David).
Mia reads books about “Demonolatry” that boast creepy illustrations of unholy beings and nuggets of wisdom about hellhounds and parasites, and before long, she’s heading out in the dead of night to check out the penitentiary for herself and, specifically, the cell of Wilson Miles (Charlie Talbert), the individual who shot himself on her doorstep.
Whereas Shelby Oaks’ true-crime affectations are reasonably persuasive, its straightforward material strains for sinister menace. From glowing eyes in the dark, to shadowy figures lurking on the frame’s periphery, to mysterious canines that pop up to bark at Mia, everything looks and sounds like a corny dramatic recreation from a typical paranormal reality-TV program, and the longer the film goes on, the less this seems intentional.
Worse, though, is the proceedings’ pile-up of moldy elements. From grainy home movies, aged photo albums, and 911 calls, to trips through nocturnal forests and subterranean tunnels and encounters with an old woman who cackles like a witch, Stuckmann leaves no horror chestnut unroasted, sabotaging his climactic revelations and casting the venture as merely an exercise in everything-but-the-kitchen-sink replication.
Mia eventually searches for her MIA relative in Shelby Oaks, and that endeavor, coupled with the fact that the gone-to-seed enclave is surrounded by woods and boasts a dilapidated amusement park, lends the film a distinct Silent Hill quality.
Yet unlike that video game hit (and its chilling 2006 adaption directed by Christophe Gans), unreal atmosphere is non-existent; on the contrary, Stuckmann and cinematographer Andrew Scott Baird’s visuals are flat and literal, awash in Blair Witch-y sigils, signs carved into trees, and fuzzy boogeyman half-visible in photographs’ background.
This is particularly problematic given that Mia behaves in ways that would only make sense in a more hallucinatory saga, and since it’s not, she comes across as daft. Exacerbating her silliness, Sullivan over-emotes with gusto, her tears and screams as affected as the rest of the mayhem.
Shelby Oaks delivers a single memorable shock but no inventive set pieces, instead falling back on settings and villains that are tepid approximations of spookshows past. Halloween-season efforts such as this are often indebted to their illustrious ancestors, and Stuckmann’s fondness for them is undeniable. At almost every juncture, though, he simply plays the hits, clumsily.
In its closing segments, the film embraces maternal anxieties via bombshells about Riley’s fate and Mia’s unfulfilled longing to have a baby with her husband Roger (Brendan Sexton III, totally wasted). The sole thing birthed by this mix-and-match retread, however, is a desire to watch the superior movies from which it so liberally cribs.
The post ‘Shelby Oaks’ Is Every Horror Film You’ve Ever Seen, Rolled Into One appeared first on The Daily Beast.
