Shelby Oaks 4K 2024 Ultra HD 2160p

Story Movie

In 2008, Riley, Mia’s younger sister and host of a popular paranormal channel, went missing in an abandoned town. Her colleagues were found brutally murdered, and the search for her reached a dead end. All these years, Mia had no leads, until 2020, when a stranger shot himself on her doorstep. In his hand, the woman finds a videotape containing the last footage shot by the YouTubers, but decides not to tell the police and sets off on her own to the place where Riley was last seen—the ghost town of Shelby Oaks.

Review 4K Movie

It seems we jumped the gun on our pick for the best horror film. *Shelby Oaks* could definitely have competed with the top contenders, but there are some caveats.

The film was directed by Chris Stackmann, who spent years reviewing other people’s horror movies on his YouTube channel and finally decided to make his own, raising the funds on Kickstarter. And in some ways, he succeeded. At least, it’s better than some works by renowned directors.

PLOT

The YouTube show “Paranormal Paranoids” suddenly disappears from the airwaves after a vague but mysterious video. The main viewer theory is, “It’s obvious—they’re hyping it up to lend credibility to their hoaxes.” But soon the bodies of three show participants are found, and host Riley vanishes without a trace.

Twelve years later, on the doorstep of her sister Mia’s house, some guy blows his brains out, and he’s found to be carrying the show’s final recording, made during the attack on the film crew.

Mia, fearing that the police will gladly blame everything on the guy who killed himself, immediately count Riley among the victims, and call off the search (which was likely already over), hides the tape and tries to figure things out on her own. To do this, she needs to return to their childhood town—Shelby Oaks, which has now turned into a ghost town.

OPINION

At the beginning, I hinted at “in places.” Overall, the movie isn’t bad—it’s even good. The main mystery is interesting, and its revelation at the end is cool and creepy. But the overall impression is that the film feels somewhat uneven. It’s like a mix of *The Blair Witch Project* and *Reincarnation*, where the brilliant first half gets lost in the second due to clichéd plot moves. The film knows how to scare, but forgets why it was trying to scare in the first place.

It’s clear that Stakmann loves “found footage” and understands the genre’s problems—which mostly boil down to the fact that it’s cheap, and everyone suddenly decided that all you need to do is shake the camera in the dark, scream into the lens while shoving it in someone’s face—and you’ve got a horror movie. And he skillfully combines found footage and staged scenes in the editing. Plus, the footage itself, shot with a YouTube aesthetic like material from a reality show, looks better than any family home movies.

Working within the budget, the special effects are hidden in the darkness, but in the finale he still succumbed to the temptation to show a rubber demon, even if only briefly.
The fear is created more by atmospheric locations (a ghost town, an abandoned prison, a house overgrown with black mold belonging to a sinister old woman straight out of Resident Evil), sounds, and music.

But the experience still fell short. In the second half, literally everything starts to fall apart. As long as it was a psychological thriller, the tension was strong, but when the demon appeared, it was as if no one believed in it. Even Camilla Sullivan (Mia), on whom the film relied, starts to overact, not to mention the rest of the cast.

VERDICT

Good in places, awkward in others. Stackmann showed that he’s familiar with the genre and has seen plenty of films, but by the end, it’s as if he himself forgot what he’d criticized others for. In the finale, the tension and the heroine’s motivation get lost in demonic special effects that aren’t really there, but still spoil the experience.

But overall—it’s a decent attempt to establish himself in the genre. If he learns from his mistakes, maybe he’ll even shoot a sequel (since the story isn’t fully resolved), which has the potential to make it into the top tier of good horror films.