REVIEW: SHELBY OAKS’ Parasocial Paranoia Is the Buzzfeed Millennial BLAIR WITCH
Move over Gen X, it’s time to be nostalgic about the mid-Aughts.
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.
