SHELBY OAKS - Mark Reviews Movies

Shelby Oaks, Neon

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 23, 2025

Former movie reviewer Chris Stuckmann makes his feature directorial debut with Shelby Oaks. The movie starts with the sense that it's going to do exactly what one expects someone known for making online videos would do. That's basically to use the world of online video-making as the entryway for a found-footage horror tale.

Stuckmann's screenplay, in other words, begins as if it's checking off boxes of assorted clichés. We learn of some self-proclaimed paranormal investigators, who gained some popularity in the early days of video-based social media with content that looked like the real deal. Many believed they found evidence of ghosts, demons, monsters, or other supernatural entities, but just as many thought the quartet was faking it all.

Then, they disappeared in 2008 while shooting footage in the abandoned town of Shelby Oaks, Ohio. Their last footage—at least what was released to the public—showed Riley (Sarah Durn), the show's host, hiding in an upstairs room in an abandoned house, hearing lots of commotion downstairs, and finally going out the door, never to be seen or heard from again.

To be fair to Stuckmann in this early section of the movie, the focus of the faux documentary isn't really the mystery of the disappearances, the discovery of a bloody crime scene that seemed to answer most questions, and the possibility that something paranormal might actually be happening in the eponymous location. Instead, it's about Riley's sister Mia (Camille Sullivan), who has lived for more than a decade at this point in a state of uncertainty about what happened to her younger sister. The fallout of Riley's disappearance has devastated Mia's life, and as the setup to what looks entirely like a familiar sort of horror tale, the attention the prologue pays to this character suggests the potential of something distinct.

Then, Stuckmann really throws us for a loop. There's basically a point of no return here, as Mia receives an unexpected guest, the documentary crew captures a moment of shocking violence, and the entire movie seems knocked into a new reality. The found-footage gimmick simply vanishes, and suddenly, we're in the middle of a more straightforward narrative and filmmaking approach.

This is a daring stylistic move, to be sure—one that, for better and for worse, forces us to wonder why the filmmaker made it in the first place. Is it Stuckmann trying to prove any expectations about what he would or should do wrong? Is it, in juxtaposing the fake "reality" of the initial documentary approach with a traditional one, some introspection about or some sly knock at the found-footage gimmick? Is it simply to surprise us?

Whatever the reason behind the shift, it kind of works at first, if only because the movie has us asking these questions, trying to piece together some thematic motivation behind the change in style, and wondering what other surprises it might have for us. That the screenplay ultimately follows a different but equally familiar set of clichés shortly after the stylistic swap, though, means none of the likely answers are that interesting.

Indeed, the rest of the plot has Mia following her sister's trail, now that she has new evidence in her possession, left behind by the stranger who makes a startling exist from the movie before he can even enter the house. It's an old digital video cassette, featuring footage from the paranormal investigators' missing camera. As awful as the final images on the video are, it does leave Mia with a little hope that Riley could still be alive.

This means an impromptu trip to Shelby Oaks for Mia, who, if she had a camera or was still being followed by the documentary crew, would essentially be going through the motions of a found-footage type of plot. She interviews people, mainly the warden (played by Keith David) of the prison where her unexpected visitor was once incarcerated, and does some research, with a helpful visit to the library's microfiche collection, and visits old sites where her sister went, including the prison itself. All the while, she keeps seeing strange silhouettes, being confronted by vicious dogs that appear to come out of and disappear into nowhere, and having the sense that someone—or something—is watching her, just as her sister was terrified by the belief a mysterious figure was somehow observing her through the second-story window of her childhood bedroom.

While this story loses that early focus on its main character and the belief that it might find a way to genuinely surprise us, the routine stuff that is the bulk of the movie is, admittedly, eerie. It essentially comes down to Mia watching that footage, wandering through decrepit locations looking for clues, and inevitably being scared by the sudden appearance of something from the darkness. Stuckmann stages these sequences with patience, and the cinematography by Andrew Scott Baird is imposing in its use of shadows.

As a straightforward horror tale, Shelby Oaks is mostly notable for its sense of building suspense and atmosphere. It's almost enough to say that the movie works at what it sets out to accomplish, but there is a major caveat to that thought. After all, this is a movie that begins with some humanity and a genuine shock that alters the very nature of the material itself. After that, the rest of it is, in another way, just a lengthy anticlimax.

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