REVIEW: SHELBY OAKS’ Parasocial Paranoia Is the Buzzfeed Millennial BLAIR WITCH
What were you doing in 2008? The United States was in a recession. Barack Obama was elected president. The Strangers, Cloverfield, and The Midnight Meat Train were in theatres. I was 16, binging obscure YouTube channels and reading spooky stories on weird text-based websites. And, also, a group of ghost hunting YouTubers disappeared in Darke County, Ohio.
The Paranormal Paranoids were a modern-day Scooby gang, filming viral content in abandoned schools, prisons, and amusement parks. It’s in the latter that the group disappears, three of them discovered dead weeks later. The body of Riley Brennan (Sarah Durn), their de-facto leader, was never found.
Ever since then, Mia Walker-Brennan (Camille Sullivan) has never given up hope that her sister is actually alive. (One of the selfie videos shown of Sarah is her playing guitar, and perhaps a bit too pointedly singing into the camera: “Big sister, won’t you find me?”) The phrase “WHO TOOK RILEY BRENNAN” had once been graffitied on scores of billboards and plastered all over MySpace walls. But by the time Shelby Oaks begins, that news story is near-defunct, now the subject of a sanitized true crime documentary filming at Mia’s house. This is when a strange man rings Mia’s doorbell, and promptly shoots himself in front of her. In his cold hand is a tape marked “Shelby Oaks,” which contains (some of) the answers she’s been waiting 12 years for. The last moments of the dead Paranoids. New angles of her sister’s disappearance.
It’s like a lost episode or a deleted scene of a long-cancelled television show. And Mia becomes obsessed.
Shelby Oaks, which had its US premiere at Fantastic Fest this week and is out through NEON on October 24, paints with a wide brush in three distinct visual eras: the modern glossy, polished Netflix true-crime documentary, the distinct grain of a late 2000s digital camera, and the current trappings of small-studio horror. It’s an eclectic mix, and one that works well to tell this specific story.
Shelby Oaks writer/director Chris Stuckmann is four years older than me (I googled). His birth year of 1988 is well within my same pre-computer millennial era. There were no cameras on our phones, but technology made capturing our lives more accessible than ever. Uploading whole albums of nights out, taken on a pocket digital point-and-shoot. The tactile soft button pushing of a handheld camcorder. The digital clipping sounds of blowing wind when you would record outside. Shelby Oaks immortalizes this era of #content well, in a way I haven’t really seen a horror movie do. It felt almost comfortable to me. Am I really nostalgic for this? Am I going crazy?
Far be it from me to complain about the ’80s look-and-feel that has long-permeated modern horror, but we’ve become so used to it as a pastiche: Spirit Halloweens are cluttered with a neon glow, further cemented by the Stranger Things phenomenon. It rocks, sure, but it also has potentially turned into a visual crutch in recent years — there’s not much left to mine from that analogue era. But there is an era of horror, brimming with creepypasta web stories, short-form scary films, rentable DVD rip-offs and reboots, that hasn’t received the same reverence. And Stuckmann plays in that time period well.
Oh my god, is this how Boomers sound about the “good ol’ days”?
Durn and Sullivan are both rather exceptional as the two sisters. Keith David’s brief appearance as a retired sheriff is a welcome presence. But it’s Derek Mears’ name that made me the most excited as it appeared in the opening credits. There was a moment during that aforementioned mid-2000s era of horror that Derek Mears was the guy! He’s still the guy! But using the actor behind Jason Voorhees from the 2009 Platinum Dunes Friday the 13th cements this new nostalgia for me. The only other movie I can remember playing in this way was I Saw the TV Glow (whose director, Jane Schoebrun, was born around the same time as Stuckmann. Again, I googled).
The Newton Brothers’ (Midnight Mass, X-Men ’97) score also possesses that same new nostalgia energy. It’s not a Carpenter-inspired score — it’s something “fresher,” reminiscent of the more sweeping scores of a slightly different era. None of it feels forced or hackneyed, though, and the movie remains taut, scary, and interesting throughout its 99-minute runtime.
Shelby Oaks should be able to be purchased as a DVD or rented through a mail-service like I would have in 2008. It should also just be seen on a big screen. It’s nice to feel seen.
