By Mo Moshaty

There’s a lot of movie in Shelby Oaks. Like a lot. Chris Stuckman’s debut feature feels like watching three ghosts fight over the same camera. One wants to be a found footage documentary about a YouTube ghost hunting collective, another wants to be a grief-soaked domestic drama about a missing sister. And the third, she’s whispering from the corner begging to be an old school supernatural horror about something ancient in the walls. All of them show up, but none of them can agree on who gets the last scare.

We start off strong (the best part of the film, I think) in in the early Internet trenches of paranormal YouTube. The ‘Paranormal Paranoids’ led by Riley Brennan (Sarah Durn) document abandoned houses and uncanny blips with the naive confidence of 2010’s create content creators. Stuntman nails this vibe: ring lights, shaky cameras, thumbnails that scream ‘We found something!’

The film’s mockumentary style brims with nostalgia and unease, and it’s a love letter to the messy analog creepiness of early online horror culture.

And then, 12 years vanish. Poof. Riley’s gone. The YouTube era has faded, and we land squarely in the domestic despair of her sister, Mia (Camille Sullivan), whose marriage to Robert (Brendan Sexton III…and no, his name is still not Warren), has withered under the weight of not knowing. They’ve stopped trying for kids. They’ve stopped trying…full stop.

Mia is stuck in a grief loop, and Sullivan sells it, even when the script occasionally hands her dialogue that sounds like it’s been through a mud-wrestling match with a Lifetime drama.

This is where ‘Shelby Oaks’ starts to feel a little like a haunted nesting doll, each layer revealing a different tone. Just when you think it’s going full ‘Lake Mungo’, it swerves into ‘The Ring’. Then for a moment it flirts with ‘The Babadook’, and by the final act we’re in full blown ‘Silent Hill’ territory.

It’s not that any of these lanes are bad, per se, they’re just happening all at once. The result is a film that’s never boring, not for a second, but occasionally exhausting. There’s a whiplash effect between documentary realism and cinematic horror that makes you wish the film had trusted its original conceit. The YouTube mockdoc framing was electric; it grounded the supernatural in the internet’s wild and weird little corners. When that dropped away, so did some of the tension.

That said, there’s plenty to enjoy. The atmosphere is deliciously damp, the camera often feels like it’s eavesdropping, and the jump scares are playful without being cheap. Stuckman clearly loves horror and wants to give us everything: mystery, monster, memory, marital tension, internet hauntology. It’s like an all-you-can-eat of subgenres and while your plate might be a mess by the end, you definitely leave full.

If Shelby Oaks had stayed in its YouTube era sandbox, or even cut back to it intermittently, it could have been something special. A found footage folklore about digital obsession and collective memory. Instead, it evolves into more of a traditional supernatural thriller. And while it’s still an incredibly fun ride, it loses that weird, sticky realism that made the first act so fun.

And it is fun. A hell of a lot of fun. Messy, fun. Ambitious fun. Occasionally overcooked fun, but fun, nonetheless. And even when it doesn’t entirely land, it’s not hard to root for that kind of audacious genre enthusiasm.

Shelby Oaks was released in the US on October 24th with a UK and I release on October 29th from NEON and Paper Street Pictures.