by Foster Harlfinger, Contributing Writer
As a young kid hopelessly obsessed with film, it wasn’t until college that I found friends who were as interested in movies as I was. Coming of age in the internet era was both a blessing and a curse, but perhaps the greatest gift the digital age has to offer is an awareness that no matter how niche your interests are, there are always others who share them. For me, that was Chris Stuckmann.
Finding Stuckmann’s online reviews simultaneously gave me the comfort of having at least one other person whose thoughts I could turn to whenever I watched a new film, while also shaping my ever-evolving taste as a moviegoer. I immediately resonated with Stuckmann’s quiet, excitable confidence as an unapologetic nerd obsessed with film, and his inability to hide his enthusiasm when discussing a movie he truly loved.
The mere existence of Shelby Oaks is something of a miracle when one considers what it took for Stuckmann to get it off the ground. What first started as a hope and a prayer soon turned into the highest-funded horror film in Kickstarter history, raising $1,390,845 — over a million dollars more than Stuckmann’s initial $250,000 goal.
As much as it is possible to view film through an objective lens, Shelby Oaks is the product of a director at the start of what will hopefully be a long and successful filmmaking career, and while that certainly brings moments of onscreen brilliance, it also comes with an acute awareness that you are watching a first-time filmmaker figure it out in real time.
The film centers around the disappearance of the Paranormal Paranoids, a paranormal investigation YouTube channel who go missing after posting a video inside the abandoned town of Shelby Oaks. 12 years later, three of the four Paranoids’ bodies have been discovered, yet Riley Brennan (Sarah Durn) remains missing. Midway through the filming of a Netflix-style true crime documentary on Riley and the other Paranoids, Mia (Camille Sullivan) rediscovers the motivation to find her long-lost younger sister after witnessing the horrific suicide of a man who may or may not have connections to the Paranoids’ disappearance.
For longtime horror fans, there is much to appreciate in Stuckmann’s vision. He is clearly influenced by many of his favorite horror films, old and new, and this results in both the film’s greatest strengths and shortcomings. Stuckmann is at his best when crafting sequences of pure, unadulterated dread. The horror of Shelby Oaks is tense, unsettling, and primal. Riley’s haunting final video upload, along with newly discovered tapes from the Paranoids’s Shelby Oaks outing looms large over the entire film, and the “man in the window” horror is undeniably effective.
Most of the film’s high points come in the first half hour, as Stuckmann effectively utilizes found footage cinematography as a playground to explore lesser seen angles of the genre. This feels particularly fresh coming from a filmmaker who understands the digital landscape as intimately as Stuckmann. As the film progresses, however, its horror increasingly resembles that of other, more memorable films, and Stuckmann’s writing cannot always match the creativity of his direction.
Shelby Oaks has the feeling of a respectable, low-budget Shudder original production helped by a few notable upgrades as a result of its acquisition by Neon. Perhaps it is unfair to compare Shelby Oaks to higher-profile debuts like Hereditary or The Witch, given its more humble beginnings as a crowdsourced film, but Stuckmann invites those comparisons himself with the inclusion of certain supernatural elements in the latter half of the film.
Stuckmann’s path to becoming a film director is an unusual one, but as his filmmaking ability and resources continue to grow, it would not be a surprise to see his career follow a similar trajectory to that of his producer Mike Flanagan, who himself took over a decade to arrive at his particular brand of character-based horror. Shelby Oaks may not be a knockout horror debut for the ages, but Stuckmann shows undeniable promise as a budding horror filmmaker, and his beginnings as an online content creator could very well become the new template for the next generation of up-and-coming filmmakers to pursue their dream in the digital age.
Rating: Liked It
Shelby Oaks is currently playing in theaters
You can read more from Foster Harlfinger, and follow him on Letterboxd