Shelby Oaks is a promising indie horror driven by smart decision-making

Horror is probably the genre that puts filmgoers’ patience to the ultimate test. This is due to its wide quality spectrum. 

When a horror movie is bad, it can be hilariously or catastrophically bad. Good horror can either be great or just plain good, with originality, fear factor and execution sustaining that watchability.

Shelby Oaks is best described as “baby’s first good horror”. While it’s nothing revolutionary in storytelling, and boasts a limited number of scares, it’s still a budget exercise in well-paced filmmaking, with a good atmosphere and a strong lead performance.

The film follows Mia Brennan (played by Camille Sullivan), who hasn’t given up the search for her younger sister Riley (Sarah Durn), who vanished alongside her team of amateur paranormal investigators in the abandoned Ohio town of Shelby Oaks. 

Though 16 years have passed since Riley’s disappearance, new videotape evidence, and a gruesome incident tied to that evidence, send Mia down a new investigative trail, on which she comes face-to-face with an unspoken evil, one that had its sights on her sister all those years ago – and is now turning its attention to Mia.

Shelby Oaks marks the feature directorial debut of Chris Stuckmann, a YouTube movie reviewer and aspiring filmmaker who has managed to shoot his shot following a highly successful Kickstarter campaign, and the support of Mike Flanagan, who is also one of the film’s producers. 

Looking simply at the story that Stuckmann co-wrote with his wife, Samantha Elizabeth, he demonstrates a solid understanding of the horror genre and its machinations, as well as how those machinations keep audiences engaged.

The film reflects a lot of good decision-making. With a runtime of only 91 minutes, it doesn’t have time to waste and therefore keeps the energy and narrative pace at consistent levels. 

Stuckmann also makes excellent use of the found-footage mode of filmmaking. This can be high risk, high reward as the mode today requires a great deal of innovation to succeed (plus, it’s a subgenre that doesn’t appeal to a lot of viewers), but Stuckmann deploys it to quickly dish out exposition and establish character beats, maximising the focus on Mia’s search for her sister.

The idea that this whole series of events begins with Riley Brenan publishing a series of amateur videos on YouTube is also a fun little nod to Stuckmann’s own professional journey.

That said, the same series of events isn’t always engaging or well defined. The first half of the film proves to be stronger than the second, and the plot twists between the two result in a loss of focus. 

Props to the writing for taking audiences somewhere they’re not expecting, but while the climax of the film is dramatically effective, it’s still a bit off course thematically. 

The film also relies very heavily on atmosphere for its scare factor, and while this atmosphere is indeed moody and sinister, backed by music from the Newton Brothers (Doctor Sleep and Five Nights at Freddy’s) and the efforts of cinematographer Andrew Scott Baird, the moments of terror are few, though fortunately close between.

Reportedly, following early screenings, Stuckmann received approval for reshoots to amp up the violence and bloody imagery, which this reviewer suspects was a good call. Lacking its more intense visual elements, the film would suffer from a lack of discernible identity.

Shelby Oaks lives by its main performance. Camille Sullivan’s Mia is by no means the most interesting of leads, but she remains sympathetic throughout and carries an air of mystery by way of her familial associations. 

And, like Stuckmann behind the camera, Mia is making smart decisions, something that typically sinks a horror film that drives for greater realism by way of its found-footage format. 

The rest of the performances are serviceable, but the film does commit the terrible crime of not having enough Keith David in it. David should never, under any circumstance or cast budget, be relegated to a single scene in a movie, as he is here.

As a serving of horror, Shelby Oaks proves to be bite-sized. But with Stuckmann proving his chops as a filmmaker, and with the movie knowing what it wants to be, it offers a glimpse of something you wouldn’t want to see in the reflection of your mirror, or caught in your car’s headlights, even for a split second. DM

Shelby Oaks is in cinemas. This review was first published on PFangirl.