SHELBY OAKS (2025)

Genre: Horror/Thriller
Director: Chris Stuckmann
Cast: Camille Sullivan, Brendan Sexton III, Keith David, Sarah Durn, Robin Bartlett, Michael Beach
Runtime: 1 hr 31 min
Rating: NC16 (Violence and Horror)
Released By: Shaw Organisation
Official Website: 

Opening Day: 1 January 2026

Synopsis: A woman's obsessive search for her missing sister leads her into a terrifying mystery at the hands of an unknown evil. 

Movie Review:

‘Shelby Oaks’ marks the filmmaking debut of Chris Stuckmann, a YouTube personality whose popularity on the streaming platform led to one of the biggest crowdfunding successes for a film project in Kickstarter history. It also boasts Mike Flanagan as its executive producer, whose clout as a horror specialist has grown since the Netflix series ‘The Haunting of Hill House’ and ‘Midnight Mass’. Alas, all that promise turns out to be pretty underwhelming, as the movie ends up being a mishmash of found-footage, missing-person, demonic possession and folk horror tropes that lack a compelling narrative to tie them all together.

That disappointment is all the more significant given its strong 20-minute pseudo-documentary opening, which outlines the disappearance of Riley Brennan (Sarah Durn), one of the four members of a YouTube group called ‘Paranormal Paranoids’ who had taken it upon themselves to explore unexplained hauntings. Whereas the rest of Riley’s ghost-hunter crew were found brutally murdered in a remote cabin in the titular abandoned town, Riley has been missing for the past 12 years, leading to widespread speculation if her disappearance was real or just a stunt, and sparking the nationwide phenomenon ‘Who Took Riley Brennan?’.

Most effectively creepy is the recovery of footage from one of the two cameras the crew had with them, which showed Riley being surrounded by mysterious fuzzy forms outside and within the cabin before vanishing into the dark. Ironically, it is when the documentary concept falls away that the movie gets progressively less and less interesting; instead, the appearance of a dishevelled man at the doorstep of Riley’s sister Mia (Camille Sullivan) who abruptly shoots himself in the head sets Mia off on a personal quest to find Riley. The man turns out to be an ex-con who had been incarcerated at Shelby Oaks’ sinister, now-shuttered penitentiary, and instead of surrendering the video she finds within the dead man’s clutched fist, Mia decides to keep it herself in the hopes of finding her own clues.

That is but the first in a series of inexplicable decisions that turns Mia from a dedicated sister into a dim-witted heroine. Knowing full well that she could come face to face with a demonic entity, why would Mia set off in the middle of the night by her own with just a flashlight to visit the aforementioned prison to see what the cell of the man who had shot himself in front of her? Just as perplexing is the improbable house in the middle of the woods that she stumbles upon, occupied by a witchy old lady (Robin Bartlett) who obviously knows more of what is going on in the town than she is letting Mia in on. Even more baffling is how Riley turns out to be, and without giving too much away, let’s just say that she has been abducted for her fertility.

To be fair, Stuckmann, who also conceived the story together with his wife Samantha Elizabeth, does a fair job keeping the story humming along; unfortunately, what started off intriguing turns out familiar and even derivative, with clear signposts of where Stuckmann probably got his ideas from, coming off at worst like a bargain-bin ‘Hereditary’ knockoff. It doesn’t help that Mia is both underwritten and underdeveloped, giving us little reason to root for her; nor for that matter is the relationship between Mia and Riley poignant enough for us to identify why the former would risk life and limb in order to try to rescue her.

So despite the promise of how it came to be made, ‘Shelby Oaks’ hardly lives up to expectation. There is potential all right, and like we said, the first 20 minutes in faux-documentary style did draw us in and get under our skin; but as with many first-time filmmakers, Stuckmann flounders in sustaining his high-concept horror, and eventually grasps at the familiar both he and his audience have seen to allow his movie to descend into an unmotivated pursuit of an unremarkable character. As much as we’d like to support new talent, this half-baked pastiche is hardly the breakout hit that gives us confidence of better things to come from the Youtuber turned filmmaker.

Movie Rating:

(A strong faux-documentary opening progressively degenerates into a mishmash of found-footage, missing-person, demonic possession and folk horror tropes that add up to little original or compelling)

Review by Gabriel Chong