While browsing the internet, you might have seen a poster asking “What happened to Riley Brennan?” featuring nothing but a short description of her popular Youtube show (Paranormal Paranoids), how she went missing, and a date. It would have been easy to mistake it for a genuine missing person poster because there was nothing about it indicating otherwise.
Shockingly, this was not a poster for a real-life person. It was an advertisement for Shelby Oaks, a movie that I believe put all of its budget into “being amazing” instead of into marketing.
Shelby Oaks is a new horror movie centered around Mia Brennan, whose sister, Riley, went missing 12 years ago while filming a paranormal investigation Youtube show. As she gets deeper into her investigation, she slowly learns that a demon has been working through one specific man from a town called Shelby Oaks. This man has been following her and her sister since they were kids. As the movie progresses, we learn that this demon needs another baby to possess and wants Riley to have a baby for that purpose.
On the surface, this plot might sound like that of a very run-of-the-mill horror movie. That’s because it absolutely is. In fact, the screenplay is one of the least original I’ve seen in a while. It follows the basic horror/thriller format of a woman knowing something spooky is happening in this small town and being treated like she’s crazy by everyone around her. However, even though this plot has been absolutely run into the ground, the movie still managed to find ways to be original.
Shelby Oaks is innovative in that it makes you feel like you’re going crazy along with the main character. Absolutely nothing supernatural or scary happens for the first 30-ish minutes. However, you continue to feel like something has happened in the same way that Mia feels like something happened to her sister, despite no evidence. At one point, her husband implies that she’s crazy. When you think about it, neither you nor Mia have seen anything to disprove this, but both of you know something happened to her. With these kinds of movies, you’re usually yelling at the other characters that the main character isn’t crazy. In Shelby Oaks, you realize that she kind of is.
The relatability of the main character is a lot of what makes Shelby Oaks feel so genuinely scary. There aren’t a lot of jumpscares, even though there’s a lot of scenes where it feels like there will be a jumpscare. It keeps you on the edge of your seat and keeps you terrified even after you leave the theater. Companies like A24 make movies that are scary when you think about them later, while other horror movies are focused on scaring you in the moment. Shelby Oaks is able to put you in the perfect goldilocks zone of being totally scared both during and long after you’ve left behind the actual monsters in the movie. Genuinely, I don’t think I’ll ever look at a dog the same way again.
Along with all of this, the atmosphere is amazing. Every small detail about this movie feels like it’s going back to what the horror genre was in the ’80s. The color grading, the soundtrack, and even just the length of this movie all make it feel like it was made before horror became the corporate machine it is today. My favorite part of Shelby Oaks was, undoubtedly, how you could actually see what was going on during scenes that happened at night. I’m assuming this was the case because they actually had important things that they wanted you to realize during these moments – things that they weren’t just going to verbally tell you in the next scene. The idea of “show, don’t tell” is so frequently forgotten about, but the writers of this movie did an amazing job of following that rule.
Unfortunately, the writers didn’t do a very good job of actually writing. The whole screenplay feels like it was made in a big factory with all the horror movies ever. I love it when horror movies have one big metaphor at the center. Shelby Oaks had no such metaphor. It’s actually incredibly straightforward. It has all the qualities of having a big twist at the end, but no such twist exists. I spent the entire movie thinking that something had to be up with the husband, and then the movie ended; he’d had a total of five minutes of screentime. There are so many things that I thought were going to turn into something big that we were just totally forgotten about. Weirdly enough, this made it a much more interesting movie, even though I don’t think it was on purpose.
The other weak spot of this movie was the special effects. The movie obviously had a small budget, but it didn’t try to work around it. Instead, it chose to have god awful visual effects that look like something out of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. This was bad considering most of the scary things in this movie used those same bad visual effects. Even if you’ve got a small budget, a lot of movies do an amazing job of hiding it by using cheaper practical effects or smaller visual effects. Shelby Oaks didn’t even try that. Unfortunately, this was not as endearing as the bad writing was. At a certain point, you have to hire Alexander Skarsgård, put him in a super weird mask, and call it a day like everyone else in the film industry does.
Despite all of these flaws, its similarity to pre-2000s horror movies makes Shelby Oaks feel very familiar to almost everyone watching. The flaws themselves are things that we’ve seen time and time again within the genre! The movie as a whole feels like you’re walking into your childhood home and seeing that the new owners totally redid your kitchen, but it’s still the same house.
Even with its lackluster marketing, Shelby Oaks shows a lot of potential and knocks it out of the park in so many ways. It’s difficult to imagine it not being remembered as one of the best horror movies of the decade. Not having heard of this movie shouldn’t stop anyone from watching it because it has something for everyone. At least, the same “something for everyone” that hundreds of horror movies have had and more.
