Shelby Oaks
It has been twelve years since the “Paranormal Paranoids,” Riley Brennan, Laura Tucker, David Reynolds and Peter Bailey, went missing while investigating Shelby Oaks, Ohio, the ghost town which dwindled to just the funfair and the prison before being abandoned completely, left to be overrun by trees and wild animals; the bodies of Tucker, Reynolds and Bailey found soon after, Riley never found, her older sister Mia still believes she may be out there in Darke County.
A stranger showing up on her door, saying the words “She finally let me go” then shooting himself in the head, in his hand is a videotape from the second camera of the night Riley went missing; the police identify him as Wilson Miles, once held in Shelby Oaks prison with his sentence and release corresponding with disturbances in Riley’s childhood, an easing of her nightmares, then her increased anxiety before her abduction, the police considering the case now closed but Mia even more determined to push forward.
The debut feature written and directed by Chris Stuckmann from a story developed with Samantha Elizabeth and one of the most successful horror projects ever supported by crowdfunding, a trip to Shelby Oaks is one of supernatural dread and creeping inevitability, Mia (Camille Sullivan) unsupported by her husband Robert (Brendan Sexton III) who fails to grasp the link in the sparse evidence between correlation and causation, because he has not seen what she has seen.
Opening with a montage of Paranormal Paranoids investigations and the news reports of their vanishing and public commentary, many regarding it as a publicity stunt, the change in style is both sudden and profound, Riley (Sarah Durn) absent but her profound terror speaking through the footage, the evidence assembled by Mia stacking up but with the unavoidable conclusion that there is something unaccountable missing, something unseen, unnamed, unknowable.
A film of half-glimpsed images in darkened windows, blending in with the branches of trees in grainy footage, of childhood fears and lingering trauma, there are aspects of Rosemary’s Baby, Race with the Devil, ‘Salem’s Lot and even Zoltan: Hound of Dracula, but it is strongest when Mia treads where she shouldn’t, the nightmare of the abandoned prison and what remains behind, the realisation her sister was watched and groomed her whole life, even from the window of cell 37.
Mia’s urgency demanding she investigates immediately a lead presents itself, in the middle of the night and without adequate preparation, equipment or backup, the atmosphere of Shelby Oaks would likely not be so oppressive in daylight, a genre obligation forgivable in the circumstances as it moves from under the rusting big wheel to the decaying shack of the hag of the forest (Robin Bartlett), Mia getting the answers and closure she desires but finding no comfort in either.
Shelby Oaks will be on general release from Wednesday 29th October
