Can a great horror movie be Frankensteined together from a laundry list of iconic ones? That's what I'm left pondering after watching Shelby Oaks, the promising and oft unnerving but also somewhat scattered first feature from popular YouTube movie reviewer Chris Stuckmann.
The movie starts out convincing you it's one thing, but reveals itself in quick succession to be a very different beast altogether. From The Blair Witch Project to Martyrs to Barbarian and several beyond that, Shelby Oaks doesn't just wear its many genre influences on its sleeves — it wears them on its chest and back and shoulders. It's a coat of many horror movies, made of cuts deep and broad. And, to ever so slightly belabor the metaphor, some of the coat fits just right, while as much of it could use some more refined tailoring.
Still, as far as Kickstarter-funded first features go, Shelby Oaks is a big, bold swing — albeit one produced by horror honcho Mike Flanagan, the man behind a swath of Netflix horror miniseries like The Haunting of Hill House and The Fall of the House of Usher. It's twisty as hell, bears some ace performances, and truly gifts audiences with some very sticky and very spooky images. Most of all, it marks the emergence of a horror filmmaker worth keeping an eye on.
"Who took Riley Brennan?" is the question at the heart of Shelby Oaks. The film opens with the last known bit of footage of Riley Brennan (Sarah Durn), YouTuber/ghost hunter, before she went missing in the titular town. In the scene, she sits on a bed in a cabin in the middle of the woods. She's seen sobbing, absolutely terrified, saying into the camera, "I'm so scared."
It's an inch-long leap from Riley's tearful lament to Heather Donahue's legendarily snotty apologia in The Blair Witch Project, the one that poetically stated, "I'm scared to close my eyes, and I'm scared to open them."
Writer-director Stuckmann anticipates his horror-loving audience will make this connection. But then he does something really interesting, pivoting from the found-footage conceit to a true-crime documentary framework. Leaping to a decade or so after Riley's disappearance, it turns out that Riley's older sister, Mia (Camille Sullivan), has spent the intervening years fruitlessly searching for the truth of what happened in the woods of Shelby Oaks that night. And she's now starring in a true-crime documentary in an effort to reignite interest in the case of her missing sister.
For horror fanatics, this turn might well recall Lake Mungo. Told via talking-head interviews with the family of the missing blonde girl at its center, the 2008 Australian horror film unfurls its paranormal revelations piecemeal through conversations and scattered bits of phone video. Lake Mungo is admittedly a deeper cut than The Blair Witch Project, but no sooner does Shelby Oaks settle into this faux-documentary conceit than Stuckmann pivots again to a straightforward narrative film. Well, it's as straightforward as the twisty likes of Hereditary or Barbarian.
Essentially, Shelby Oaks maintains its cast, but ditches the documentary framework altogether, showing us what is "really" happening — but through artifice, forcing us to question what is real. The camerawork becomes stylized, with special effects and slow motion and close-ups; an aggressive and manipulative score takes over. The film will shift from these narrative scenes to the documentary setup to found footage and back again, maximizing this sense of narrative disquiet.
These structural sleights of hands, like all good and proper rug-pullings, are where Shelby Oaks works its greatest magic. Playing on the expectations of horror diehards, Stuckmann manages to keep us on our toes, even discombobulated. We find ourselves switching between missing-person found footage to the cult horror of Hereditary with the twists and turns (and hidden underground caverns) of Martyrs and Barbarian, and then right back to a talking-head true-crime doc on a dime. This all builds up its own sort of disassociation within the experience of watching it.
Despite these daring shifts, Shelby Oaks begins to feel more like the parts of its sum and not vice versa. Stuckmann is motioning toward all of these other movies to unmoor us, but those references often distract from the actual plot and, in turn, undermine our investment in it. For instance, the casting of Brendan Sexton III as Mia's husband proves distracting, even though he's terrific. An actor who's been killing it since Todd Solondz's 1995 hit, Welcome to the Dollhouse, Sexton turns in yet another lovely, sad piece of work here. But you set him against multiple scenes that take place inside of a haunted prison, and now all I'm thinking about is Session 9, Brad Anderson's fantastically creepy 2001 haunted prison movie, where Sexton made a mark as one of the asbestos cleaners who found himself on the wrong end of some rusty psychiatric equipment.
To what end is this? At what point do these Easter eggs overwhelm? All these allusions ultimately get in the way of Shelby Oaks standing on its own and becoming truly, deeply scary. Stuckmann seems very aware of the exact moment when his scares are supposed to land, often to the point of self-consciousness. You could set a timer to when the thing you're supposed to be dreading will appear, and the dreaded thing will stick that mark every time. There are moments when a zag would've kicked the ass of a zig, but Stuckmann keeps on zigging, playing right into horror connoisseur expectations. There is real, earned tension, but the film keeps deflating itself despite the fun of its reality-shifting and the many excellent go-for-broke performances therein.
An actor who's been nipping at the edges of recognition for two decades, appearing in TV shows from Dark Angel to The Man in the High Castle, Camille Sullivan has long proven a reliable performer. And here at last she is given the spotlight to make the most of it.
Even when Mia starts doing incredibly stupid things that put her right in harm's way, Sullivan is genuinely devastating. She sells the hell out of bad choices, making it clear that Mia's a person who would go to any lengths to uncover what happened to her beloved sister. (And as long as we're talking references, besides this being the lead's arc in that French Extremity classic Martyrs, it's straight out of the terrifying 1988 Dutch thriller The Vanishing, too.)
Sullivan nails big action moments, like emotional blowups and freak-outs in which her palpable fright is legitimately difficult to look at. But even the small moments give her opportunities to send shivers. Just watch the way the flashlight trembles in her hand as she investigates that haunted prison, a subtle shift in body language that communicates a bone-deep terror. It's those touches that carry the audience alongside Mia the entire way.
Sarah Durn is also haunting as missing girl Riley, who has to sell her undoing while staring off into space during the "naturalistic" found-footage portions of this movie. These are scenes we keep coming back to to see more of as, natch, more footage gets found, and her haunted presence diffuses into every corner of the film. As we know from decades of subpar found-footage movies, it's not easy, this high-wire balancing act of giving a relaxed and unprofessional-seeming performance under those constraints. Loads have failed spectacularly. But Durn makes us understand why her sister won't let her go even as everyone else has long given up. She makes Riley our ghost, too.
The whole ensemble expertly submerges into the multiple realities of this story. Even if Stuckmann needs to get a little bit out of his own way in some other areas, he proves to be terrific with his performers. Sullivan and Sexton share some very moving moments together as they watch their marriage crumble in the face of tragedy. Michael Beach wears a bone-deep exhaustion in his performance as the main detective on the case, giving a lived-in sense of resignation at the system's endless failures. And Keith David (the deep-voiced legend from The Thing and They Live, among many) shows up to Keith David it out of the park, playing the former warden of that haunted prison who has seen some shit and who, in typical fashion, is going to colorfully monologue to you all about it.
But best of all is the great and notoriously underused Robin Bartlett. One of those stalwart character actors with decades of stealing scenes under their belts (she's been doing it since Heaven's Gate in 1980, but I always first think of her hilarious scenes around the dinner table in Inside Llewyn Davis whenever I see her), Bartlett shows up and gives the movie a last-act goose that takes it over the edge into true unhinged horror-movie delight. More I cannot and will not spoil, except to say that yes, this is how you give Robin Bartlett her due. She ends up stealing — and in so doing, making — the entire movie.
Playing like a post-post-modern pastiche, an ouroboros of antecedents, and sometimes just a wicked walk through a nightmare wasteland, Shelby Oaks has enough gas in its tank for 10 movies. That it sometimes feels like 10 movies we've seen before is both part of its weird ballsy charm and its scrappy undoing. In the end, Shelby Oaks is a battle between Stuckmann's many, many inspirations. But the gripping performances and big swings in style make for a movie worth its runtime. Despite its faults, the directorial debut should prove a hell of a calling card for Chris Stuckmann as a new voice in horror. I can't wait to see what he delivers to us next.
Shelby Oaks was reviewed out of the Fantasia International Film Festival.
