Shelby Oaks Review: This Found-Footage Horror Is Haunted by Tired Tropes

The pleasures of online sleuthing lie in the chase. True-crime enthusiasts, believers in ghosts and apparitions, haunted house hunters — these are all people who pride themselves on being able to peer into corners that traditional law enforcement cannot reach. Found footage films have historically benefited from this, too, where audiences find themselves immersed in evidence of the unexplainable.

Shelby Oaks, a loose continuation of the popular YouTube series of the fictional “Paranormal Paranoids,” is unusually skittish about its own premise and its format. After a decently haunting and well-set-up pre-credits act, writer-director Chris Stuckmann abandons the found footage for a sleek thriller — an approach that sinks further and further into the hellish pits of somnambulant horror tropes.

One of the most boring horror releases of Neon’s output, Stuckmann’s feature directorial debut fundamentally misunderstands the intrigue of the very genre he traffics in. It is a truly bizarre and frustrating decision to take the time to set up a faux documentary, found-footage horror, only to abandon it for something so much more conventional and non-distinctive. Which isn’t to say that the opening act is all that convincing, either, as most of the found materials is unconvincing and shoddily made. And the acting, across the board, is bad.

But it at least had its premise going for it. Riley Brennan (Sarah Durn) is an eclectic artist who becomes the face of the Paranoids, a group of four amateur paranormal investigators who have, we are told, brought this once-ridiculed substrata of the internet into respectability. Or, at least, notoriety, which is compounded by the sudden disappearance of all four members some 12 years ago, and which gives the group more fame than ever before. While half the internet cries publicity stunt, the other half begs the authorities to take it seriously.

In the present day, much of the investigation has gone dry, though Riley’s older sister, Mia (Camille Sullivan), is now the subject of a Netflix-esque documentary. One day, while being interviewed in her living room, a haggard, dirtied man (Charlie Talbert) shows up at the front door clutching a tape labeled “Shelby Oaks.” He tells Mia, “She’s finally let me go,” then shoots himself in the head before Mia can ask what he meant. Cut to the opening credits.

The name refers to an abandoned town on the edge of Ohio, a small place known for its amusement park and high-security penitentiary, all of which were being investigated by Riley’s group before they all went missing. On the tape, which Mia curiously decides to withhold from the police, Riley and company are seen exploring the town before all but Riley are viciously murdered.

Lots of poor horror films hinge on bad decision-making by their protagonists, but there’s something especially ridiculous about a person who decides not to enlist any help whatsoever in her investigation, especially with such a massive public at her disposal. That she then decides to leave the house, by herself, late at night, and head into an abandoned prison that she knows to be haunted is plainly foolish (Stuckmann does give minor lip service to justify Mia’s spate of choices, but it is so deeply unconvincing and expository).

What follows is like watching paint dry, if the paint were moderately spooky. If you can name a paranormal horror trope, this film has got it: discordant musical stings, poorly choreographed jump scares, creepy old women whose hospitality belies a disturbing evil presence, strange patterns, research into old textbooks and headlines, and a drunken, scarred old man (Keith David). Shelby Oaks is nothing if not a cavalcade of terrible filmmaking decisions, trope upon trope done worse than the material it apes.

The revelations of the film, once they come, are admittedly disturbing. But the route to get there is paved with blandness and awkward acting. Sullivan spends the majority of the film doing staggered breathing exercises meant to evoke perpetual fear (yes, I get it, it’s very cold when the devil is near). Perhaps the reason that people abandoned Shelby Oaks wasn’t because the town was haunted but because it was just exceedingly dull.