Shelby Oaks
Does a long history of reviewing art make you a good artist? If you’ve identified elementary mistakes in the works of others, does that mean you get to avoid making them in your own work?
That sure would be good news for certain people, such as handsome book reviewers who also write fiction as a hobby. But is it true? In order to test this hypothesis, 14,720 Kickstarter backers gave film Youtuber Chris Stuckmann well over a million dollars in order to create his first feature film; film studio Neon, of Longlegs fame, decided to join the scientific inquiry by distributing it to cinemas.
The resulting test was a resounding success, in that it proved once and for all that no, being a critic of art does not, by itself, make you a good artist.
Shelby Oaks is based on Stuckmann’s Youtube series Paranormal Paranoids, which it also serves as a continuation of/ending to. Now, Stuckmann is one of those internet personalities who has a cloud of haters buzzing around him constantly. I do not know why, nor do I care to find out. For my part, I was a pretty regular watcher of his reviews more than a decade ago, but I eventually drifted to other movie Youtubers and haven’t watched any of his stuff since.
I should make it clear up front that that my opening preamble to this post is mostly facetious; it’s kind of interesting that Stuckmann is a critic turned director, but I don’t actually care all that much, and I didn’t watch Shelby Oaks out of some desire to stick it to the Stuck. Mostly, I just thought it was a cool-looking horror movie with some good marketing.
The premise is that during the Paranormal Paranoids Youtube series—which you don’t need to be familiar with to watch Shelby Oaks—a team of Youtube investigators got mildly famous by capturing unprecedented levels of paranormal activity on camera. They then got proper famous when they all vanished while investigating the abandoned town of Shelby Oaks. Twelve years later our protagonist, Mia Brennan, is still trying to find her sister Riley, who served as the channel’s “person who senses things and gets spooked easily” character. While appearing in a documentary about the vanishing, Mia gets a big clue in the form of a disturbed-looking guy who shows up at her house and shoots himself in the head, clutching a tape of unseen footage from the Paranormal Paranoids’ final investigation.
That plot description, mentioning as it does lots of tapes and previously-recorded material, would seem to indicate that Shelby Oaks is a found footage movie. In fact, it is not; the opening twelve minutes or so do consist of the documentary that Mia is participating in at the beginning, and there’s plenty of excerpts from Paranormal Paranoids mixed in, but after the late opening credits roll, the movie is traditionally movie-like. Popular consensus seems to be that it would have been better off staying as found footage; while I do agree that the mockumentary prologue is the best part of the movie, I think that’s less due to the format and more due to the fact that the movie’s gaping, amateurish flaws hadn’t revealed themselves by that point.
What are those flaws, you ask? How about the fact that the movie doesn’t really have a plot.
About 85% of the film—and that’s being generous—consists of filling in backstory of one kind or another, whether it’s the circumstances of Riley’s disappearance, her and Mia’s childhood experiences that seem to tie into said disappearance, or the revelation of what happened to Riley.
The actual present-day plot where characters do things in real time is incredibly thin. There’s a conflict between Mia and her husband that barely counts as a C-plot, let alone a B-plot, there’s Mia doing a few interviews to chase up leads, and…that’s essentially it. The rest of the movie consists of an interminable, unbroken stretch of Mia wandering around dark places with a flashlight, during which she essentially stumbles upon Riley’s location by accident. It feels like you’re watching someone play a bad horror video game, badly.
Oh, and the explanation for what happened to Riley? It’s another fucking demon, which was summoned by a switch, just like I complained about in my review of Undertone. Yes, Mia finds information on the demon by googling it.
Then again, why shouldn’t Shelby Oaks rip off modern horror trends? It’s not like it’s doing anything else original. Mia and Riley’s backstory is lifted straight out of Paranormal Activity, the wooden occult effigies (which look hilariously similar to the Vampire Academy logo, incidentally) and the creepy house in the woods are straight from The Blair Witch Project, there’s demonic pacts and occult mummery like in Hereditary. The movie even, in the form of a terrible-looking CGI ghost dog, pays homage to The Bye Bye Man, widely considered to be the worst horror movie ever put out by a major studio until October 25th 2025, when Shelby Oaks came out.
Not a single frame of the actual film is scary at all, unless you find endless scenes of Mia looking at carvings on trees or shining her flashlight into dark corners terrifying. Frustratingly, and confusingly, the snippets we get from Paranormal Paranoids are actually effectively creepy and eerie, possibly because Stuckmann didn’t have all that kickstarter money to blow on shit-looking CGI dogs. This seems to indicate that he is, in fact, capable of turning out competent horror filmmaking. I just don’t understand why he didn’t do it for his feature film debut.
Despite my rather harsh criticism of the movie, I hope Stuckmann keeps making movies. I like the idea of people who gathered a following on the internet getting the money and backing to make their weird projects a reality. Let Shelby Oaks be the embarrassing amateur effort where Stuckmann made the kinds of mistakes that all beginners make, before moving on to better things.