Shelby Oaks (2025) is directed by Chris Stuckmann, who also wrote the film alongside Samantha Elizabeth. It stars Camille Sullivan, Sarah Durn, Charlie Talbert, Michael Beach, Brendan Sexton III, Robin Bartlett, Keith David, C.L. Simpson, Caisey Cole, Anthony Baldasare, Eric Francis Melaragni, Lauren Ashley Berry, Emily Bennett, Rob Grant, and Derek Mears. The film follows Mia (Sullivan), a woman searching for her sister, Riley (Durn), a paranormal investigator who mysteriously disappeared within the abandoned town of Shelby Oaks. During her investigation, Mia uncovers secrets about the town’s dark past, as well as the sinister nature of her sister’s disappearance. 

Sullivan and Durn are two leads who clearly have a lot of talent, so it’s often disappointing that their performances feel severely handcuffed by Stuckmann’s cliche, awkward dialogue. This stops these characters from ever feeling like authentic human beings, making it difficult for the viewer to form an emotional connection. Thankfully, they effectively convey feelings of crippling fear and are complex enough to avoid coming across as caricatures, but the same can’t be said for the rest of the cast. Supporting characters such as Shelby Oaks prison’s alcoholic ex-warden (David) and Mia’s cartoonishly crappy husband (Sexton III) are laughably generic and only serve to lessen the overall experience. 

On one hand, it feels as if Stuckmann deeply understands the horror genre. He pays countless homages to his influences, giving the experience a certain scavenger-hunt quality for horror nuts. On the other hand, he struggles to sidestep some of the genre’s most frustrating yet easily avoidable cliches. Everything fans know about Stuckmann would imply that he’d recognize and thus avoid these tropes, but it’s almost as if he wants to honor them instead. I have a feeling that most audiences don’t get excited by the idea of praising/honoring the cliches and tropes that are essentially a bane to truly original storytelling. 

Besides the two big surprises/scares that begin and end the film, this is mostly just a typical exercise in atmosphere. Unfortunately, it’s essentially just horror cliche after horror cliche. For example, there’s even the all-too-familiar scene in which the protagonist researches old news articles on a library computer that seemingly hasn’t been updated since 2000. At only 90 minutes, the film struggles to find unique ways to scare the audience. Characters walk down dark hallways slower than crippled snails and watch homemade videos where they can barely make out an odd figure in the background, but none of it ever pays off until the very end. On top of this, there are just a couple of odd decisions that make the viewer scratch their head. For example, after someone brutally dies right in front of Mia, she’s shown hours later in her home without having washed the person’s blood off her face. Unless you’ve been fighting for your life the entire time, you’d think cleaning yourself would be a top priority, considering it’d only take about 30 seconds.  

Overall, this is an amateurish, cliché-filled take on the found-footage horror subgenre that somehow still conveys the immense passion of its creative team. It’s sloppily written, which hurts the performances and ultimately prevents the viewer from immersing themselves in the story. The climax ends up being satisfying, but I’m not entirely convinced it’s worth all of the boring build-up. It often feels like a slow experience at only 90 minutes. I’m not impressed by Stuckmann’s first effort, but I do feel he shows promise. I think there’s a good chance his next film will be an improvement in nearly every way. C