October is in full swing. Houses and yards are adorned with all types of spooky decorations. Store shelves are overflowing with candy. The costume industry is counting its millions. Halloween season is upon us. For genre fans, this is the best time of the year, as this is the time where theaters and streaming services offer up a buffet of new Horror movies. ‘Tis the season after all. The new independent chiller, Shelby Oaks, sets out to stake its claim and find an audience during 2025’s overcrowded spooky movie season.
Written by Sam Liz and director Chris Stuckman, Shelby Oaks is a mixture of the found footage genre, ghost story, and supernatural mystery; failing at all three.
Sarah Durn is Riley, a popular YouTuber who does paranormal investigations with her team, who call themselves the Paranormal Paranoids. While on an investigation in the titular town (now abandoned), Riley goes missing and her case becomes a national phenomenon. “Who took Riley?” emerges as a popular phrase amongst her fanbase.
A decade after her disappearance, Riley’s sister Mia (Camille Sullivan) finds a video cassette that may hold the key to the mystery of her sibling. Participating in interviews by a documentary crew doing a story about the incident, Mia hopes to uncover the truth of what happened. Of course, ghostly apparitions and unnerving visions suggest something supernatural.
1999’s The Blair Witch Project began the found footage craze. Directors Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick used the grainy film stock minimalist approach to create something unique. Of the many found footage pictures that followed, only a handful understood how to be creative with the genre. This is a style of filmmaking where less is always more. Stephen Cognetti’s excellent Hell House LLC series is the best post-Blair Witch Project example.
Director Chris Stuckman uses the found-footage moments sparsely, but doesn’t do anything interesting with them. These segments are found in the recovered footage of the Paranormal Paranoids’ videoblog. We are now 26 years into these types of scenes and the new car smell has long worn off. While Shelby Oaks isn’t a full-on found footage movie, the screenplay adds nothing new.
In the film’s first thirty or so minutes, the director achieves a nice atmospheric quality. Andrew Scott Baird’s camera captures the emptier and more run down neighborhoods of Cleveland, Ohio and its surrounding areas, giving the film a quietly bleak aesthetic. Alas, the effective mood fails to endure, as Liz and Stuckman’s screenplay becomes lost in its own ideas. It is unclear what tone the filmmakers are searching for and the whole exercise begins to feel as if they were winging it in trying to bring the story to a conclusion. There is just too much thrown in without any clarity, eventually crumbling under the wait of utter confusion. Audiences will be asking themselves, “Who is that?”, “Is that a ghost or a human?”, and “What the hell does this person have to do with the story?” The filmmakers offer no real answers to many of their own questions.
The film’s major problem is a lack of original spark. As the movie progresses, it becomes unclear what is happening to who and why. This is not because of a well-designed intricate plot, but a muddled screenplay that wanders aimlessly across the screen. Stuckman throws in some references to other horror pictures, but nothing clicks. His homages become a reminder that we are watching a movie that suffers from a lack of originality and an unavoidable been-there-done-that vibe.
Chris Stuckman shows promise. The previously mentioned atmospheric quality is quite effective and the filmmaker proves he knows how to be patient in his filmmaking. The movie looks good and has a good creep factor now and again. The screenplay is where the film finds its issues. There is both too much and not enough to the story.
This is Sam Liz’s first screenplay and Chris Stuckman’s debut as a feature director. The two worked hard to get this film made; using a Kickstarter campaign that proved this was something fans wanted to see. I commend any filmmaker who (in today’s American cinema wasteland) can get a feature off the ground. Maybe two two will offer something stronger in their sophomore effort.
Shelby Oaks might be a fun watch for those who donated to the film’s crowdfunding campaign and to some horror fans.
Stuckman and Liz get an “E” for effort, but not a passing grade.
Shelby Oaks
Written by Sam Liz and Chris Stuckman
Directed by Chris Stuckman
Starring Camille Sullivan, Sarah Durn, Brendan Sexton III, Keith David
R, 109 Minutes, Neon, Paper Street Pictures, Title Media
