{"id":92572,"date":"2025-10-23T05:27:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-23T05:27:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/92572\/"},"modified":"2025-10-23T05:27:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-23T05:27:08","slug":"the-derivative-hollow-horror-film-you-didnt-ask-for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/92572\/","title":{"rendered":"The Derivative, Hollow Horror Film You Didn\u2019t Ask For"},"content":{"rendered":"

The new horror movie \u201cShelby Oaks\u201d doesn\u2019t begin well. <\/p>\n

It ends worse, granted, but it\u2019s off to a rough start. The title card describes the premise of \u201cGrave Encounters\u201d and then one of the first lines of dialogue, from missing YouTube paranormal investigator Riley Brennan (Sarah Durn), is a direct lift from \u201cThe Blair Witch Project.\u201d If \u201cShelby Oaks\u201d was a self-aware spin on found footage horror, or a cheeky parody in the \u201cScary Movie\u201d vein, it could have gotten away with that. Instead, these shoutouts only remind us of other, better movies, to which \u201cShelby Oaks\u201d cannot compare.<\/p>\n

Camille Sullivan stars as Mia, who only has two character traits: her sister is missing, and she wanted to be a mom but she\u2019s not. The first bit of the movie is a found-footage documentary, detailing how Riley\u2019s YouTube series \u201cParanormal Paranoids\u201d was an online sensation twelve years ago, back when YouTube was new (it had already been popular for seven years) and also there wasn\u2019t much media for people who were interested in the supernatural. Except for \u201cGhost Hunters,\u201d which had already been on TV for almost a decade and already spawned many imitators. But never mind, I guess that zeitgeist didn\u2019t count.<\/p>\n

A sudden tragedy pushes Mia to explore new facets of her sister\u2019s case, like scanning Riley\u2019s most popular videos, released just before she went missing, and finding a mysterious figure in the background. Apparently, in this notorious missing-person\u2019s case, about a famous internet celebrity, nobody paid any attention to this widely available, relevant footage. And, it turns out, they never actually searched around the area where Riley\u2019s last footage was filmed, even a little, because if they had this movie would have been over in minutes. But let\u2019s not get ahead of ourselves.<\/p>\n

After the faux documentary, Mia spends several minutes watching even more videos, then proceeds to investigate some more. Eventually she travels to a ghost town called Shelby Oaks, looks around, by herself, and gets scared a little, before the whole story basically falls into her lap. Frankly, the weirdest thing is that no one goes with her. Mia\u2019s on the outs with her husband, sure, but she also had a whole documentary crew with her when one of the biggest plot points literally knocked at her door. You\u2019d think they\u2019d want to, you know, document this. But apparently true crime documentarians aren\u2019t very invested in true crime. Or documenting things.<\/p>\n

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Structurally there\u2019s not much to \u201cShelby Oaks.\u201d Writer\/director Chris Stuckmann pulls the rug out early on, switching from faux documentary to a conventional cinematic approach, but he doesn\u2019t have much to say about either format. He\u2019s not commenting on the positive and negative qualities of found footage, mockumentaries, true crime or even standard horror fare. He just pulls a bait-and-switch, then immediately makes one of his protagonists watch yet another video, then gives up and takes us on the same narrative journey you\u2019d find in an actual found-footage movie.<\/p>\n

But without a found-footage gimmick, a lot of this journey isn\u2019t justified. The interminable slowness before each scare just feels slow, because we\u2019re not waiting for something to pierce the \u201cfound\u201d footage\u2019s veil of reality, we\u2019re waiting for a scene that already looks creepy to get on with it. The protagonist\u2019s uncontrollable urge to ignore red flags walk directly into terrifying situations is hard to justify when she doesn\u2019t need to get any of this on camera. She just needs to run and call the police or an ambulance. Her motivation is to save the day, not to make a damn movie.<\/p>\n

So what is \u201cShelby Oaks\u201d about? By the end of the film, all is finally revealed, and the answer is \u201cnot much.\u201d You could say Stuckmann doesn\u2019t adequately explore his themes, but that would imply \u201cShelby Oaks\u201d has themes. A theme is threaded throughout a narrative. It amplifies the events and the characters, and gives the work of art a sense of purpose. This screenplay seems to confuse a theme with a set-up and a pay-off, since instead of infusing this story with meaning, one particular topic just gets mentioned a couple times. Then at the end the plot gets back around to it, as if that was a twist. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s not a twist. It\u2019s not a theme. It\u2019s not subtext. It\u2019s just clunky foreshadowing. It\u2019s a note on an index card that never got expanded on, which leaves the movie feeling hollow and pointless.<\/p>\n

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I\u2019ll say this for \u201cShelby Oaks,\u201d and no, it\u2019s not that the film is short. It is short, sure, technically you\u2019re right, but it doesn\u2019t feel short. The characters and plot aren\u2019t hefty enough to fill the running time properly. What it does have is excellent cinematography, courtesy of Andrew Scott Baird (\u201cBlood Relatives\u201d), who establishes each scene as though it\u2019s incredibly portentous, even though it\u2019s usually not. He guides our eye into negative spaces, forcing us to hunt each frame for monsters.<\/p>\n

Yes, the movie looks scary. So scary it could almost be confused for a scary movie. Almost. But only if you\u2019re not paying attention, and miss how shallow, derivative and underwritten it is. It\u2019s that rare horror film that\u2019s scarier if you have it on in the background while you\u2019re doing a sudoku puzzle than if you\u2019re actually, you know, watching it.<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"\t\t\t\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The new horror movie \u201cShelby Oaks\u201d doesn\u2019t begin well. It ends worse, granted, but it\u2019s off to a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":92573,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[62313,28450,146,85,46,397,62314],"class_list":["post-92572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-camille-sullivan","tag-chris-stuckmann","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-movies","tag-shelby-oas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92572","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92572"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92572\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/92573"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}