Shelby Oaks (2024): A Love Letter to Found Footage That Can’t Quite Deliver

There’s something both admirable and slightly painful about Shelby Oaks. Chris Stuckmann spent years on YouTube explaining exactly what makes horror work — the atmosphere, the dread, the craft of withholding. He knows the genre intimately. And then he made a film that demonstrates, with some uncomfortable clarity, that knowing what makes something great and being able to do it yourself are two different things.

That said: this is a genuine effort, backed by genuine passion, and it shows. Shelby Oaks isn’t a disaster. It’s something more interesting — a film that works in patches, sometimes quite well, and that points toward a filmmaker who might yet make something worthy of the genre he clearly loves.

What Shelby Oaks Is About

Years ago, a group of paranormal investigation YouTubers — the Paranormal Paranoids — went missing while filming an episode in Shelby Oaks, an abandoned settlement in rural Ohio. Most of them were found dead. Riley Brennan, the group’s central figure, was never found at all.

Now Riley’s sister Mia, played by Camille Sullivan, is picking up the thread. Armed with her own camera and a desperation that the film earns fairly quickly, she starts tracing the last known movements of the Paranormal Paranoids — talking to witnesses, revisiting locations, and eventually heading toward Shelby Oaks itself. What she finds there isn’t easily explained.

The film opens as a faux true-crime documentary — narrated, archival, structured like a streaming series episode — before shifting into something more conventional as Mia’s investigation moves from reconstruction into the present. It’s a hybrid approach, and the seams show.

The Shelby Oaks Trailer

Review: Shelby Oaks (Spoiler-Free)

The first twenty minutes of Shelby Oaks are good. Properly good. The mockumentary framing — talking heads, archival footage of the Paranormal Paranoids, the slow construction of a mystery — has exactly the atmosphere Stuckmann is reaching for. There’s a title sequence that interrupts the mock-doc style in genuinely unexpected fashion, and for a moment you think: this is going to be something.

Then the film pivots. Mia takes over from the documentary framing, and Shelby Oaks becomes a more conventional horror film — one that draws heavily on The Blair Witch Project, Lake Mungo, and the kind of slow-burn supernatural dread that those films generate almost effortlessly. The problem is that Stuckmann is a film critic who knows these films extremely well, and that knowledge sometimes works against him. There are moments here that feel less like influences absorbed and more like references being checked off.

Camille Sullivan is good throughout — grounded, believable, carrying scenes that the script doesn’t always give her enough to work with. Brendan Sexton III and Keith David do solid work in smaller roles. The cast is the film’s most reliable asset, and they give it more emotional weight than the writing perhaps deserves.

The pacing is the real issue. Shelby Oaks builds and builds, but what it’s building toward doesn’t quite justify the accumulation of dread that precedes it. The mystery is compelling; the resolution is less so. And the tonal shift between the sharp, stylised opening act and the more familiar horror territory of the second half never fully resolves — the two halves feel like different films that have agreed to coexist without quite becoming one.

None of this is fatal. There are legitimately unsettling moments here, particularly in the footage of the Paranormal Paranoids themselves — glimpses of something wrong at the edges of the frame, the kind of horror that works precisely because it stays at the edges. When Stuckmann trusts that instinct, the film earns its scares. When he reaches for something bigger, it loses the thread.

Verdict

Shelby Oaks is an uneven debut from a filmmaker who clearly loves this genre and is still learning how to make it his own. The opening act is strong, the cast is committed, and there are genuine moments of atmosphere scattered throughout. But the hybrid structure never quite coheres, and the film ultimately delivers less than the sum of its influences suggests it should.

Worth watching for found footage enthusiasts, and worth watching with some patience — the first twenty minutes alone justify the effort. Just don’t expect the rest of the film to match them.

Where to Watch Shelby Oaks

Similar Movies to Shelby Oaks

If the true-crime mockumentary angle is what drew you in, these films share the same hybrid DNA — part documentary reconstruction, part horror. All of them manage the balance more cleanly than Shelby Oaks, which is perhaps why Stuckmann was drawn to them in the first place.

Lake Mungo (2008) — The most obvious reference point, and the stronger film. An Australian family grieves the drowning of their teenage daughter, but the footage they find afterwards suggests something else was going on. Mockumentary horror at its most restrained and devastating — and the template Shelby Oaks most clearly reaches for.

Horror in the High Desert (2021) — A hiker goes missing in the Nevada desert. A mockumentary reconstruction pieces together what happened. The same structure as Shelby Oaks, executed with comparable ambition and slightly more discipline in how it deploys its found footage elements.

The Blair Witch Project (1999) — The unavoidable ancestor. Three student filmmakers, one camera, one forest, and a legend. Shelby Oaks wears its debt to this film openly, which makes the comparison inevitable — and not entirely flattering.

Butterfly Kisses (2018) — A filmmaker finds footage of two film students who disappeared while documenting an urban legend in the woods. Like Shelby Oaks, it’s as much about the act of obsessive documentation as it is about what’s being documented — and it handles the meta-layers more confidently.