Riley Brennan (Sarah Durn), the lead in the YouTube team the Paranormal Paranoids, has been missing for twelve years, but her sister, Mia (Camille Sullivan), never stopped looking for her. When Mia gets her first solid lead since 2008, “Shelby Oaks” (2025) shows the result of Mia pulling that thread, but what it unravels may upend everything that she thought that she knew about herself, their childhood and the titular abandoned town and its surroundings. Can a demon stop a sister’s love? The narrative structure is more thrilling than the story once the pieces of the puzzle fall into place, but it is still a fun ride that will leave you hungry for more.
If you are unaware of “Shelby Oaks” origin story, keep it that way until after you have seen the film because otherwise you will inadvertently spoil yourself. The following is all you need to know. The members of the four Paranormal Paranoids were already introduced in a YouTube series, which appeared four years ago with the team’s name as the title. The series included thirteen episodes of varying lengths that total around sixty-four minutes. They recorded themselves visiting strange sites and were successful at capturing the supernatural on film. Riley was clearly the lead and seemed more vulnerable to the phenomenon. Peter Bailey (Anthony Baldasare) is the one who talks the most after Riley. David (Eric Francis Melaragni) is the quiet cameraman. Laura Tucker (Caisey Cole) is the Black friend and least realistic part of the movie so she needed a backstory because Black people would not mess with the supernatural. Either she is biracial, transracial or…… They exist so Riley is not talking to herself, and the group had potential because they were not immediately annoying, which is the only drawback of found footage films.
The found footage aspect of “Shelby Oaks” was strong and effective, but a lot of it comes from the already available YouTube content so wait to watch it after the movie. They are thin characters, and though unnecessary, not a lot of details are given about the other three or how the team members met. It is the Riley show, and they are just hanging out with the wrong person. It is surprising that they are not pivotal to the plot, and in the movie, it is virtually impossible to distinguish Peter from David even if your life depended on it. The footage supplements the documentary being made about the search for Riley and the reaction to Riley’s disappearance in the media with a lot of archival news footage. Predominantly set in Darke County (get it), Ohio, the documentary, which is a huge swath of the movie, revolves around Mia with Janet (Emily Bennett) behind the camera. Unlike a lot of fake documentaries and found footage films, Janet never gets sucked into the horror, which is another surprise. If you watch the movie in a theater on a big screen full of moviegoers, the switch from documentary to a traditional narrative feature format told from Mia’s perspective feels as if you are being sucked into the plot further.
If “Shelby Oaks” works, it is because the change in format from documentary to narrative format feels like a roller coaster ride and is the real scare, but after the first time, it becomes more familiar, and the story must do the heavy lifting along with Sullivan, who makes Mia easy to relate to and root for. Sullivan brings a lot of credibility to the character. When her compassionate and patient husband, Robert (Brendan Sexton III), delivers good advice in a way that cuts Mia off from further seeking any further validation and leaves her alone in a search, it feels as if he is the trope of the husband who gaslights his wife, and it is easy to hate him, but he is right. Writer and director Chris Stuckman, who conceived the story with Sam Liz, use the audience’s favor to further suck us into Mia’s story. Somehow when characters do incredibly dumb things, it does not rise to the level of writing them off as red shirts because of Sullivan’s emotion.
The story puts new names on old mythology so do not bother going to demonology books to supplement the theories that “Shelby Oaks” offers. There is a demon, an incubus, and Stuckman and Liz combine the demon with another supernatural figure which usually are not paired to create something new, but for hard core horror fans, the remix will not be sufficient to throw them off the scent of the movie’s trajectory. Once the pieces are presented, the puzzle is easy to solve, and Stuckmann and Liz borrow heavily from “Hereditary” (2018), “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968), “The Omen” franchise, “Supernatural” television series among so many others. Again, it is the mixing and matching of the tropes with the superb acting that makes the movie fun to watch. One scene with Sullivan and Keith David as the warden of a decaying prison is worth the price of admission.
Visually, “Shelby Oaks” stumbles as Mia leaves her house, and the focus shifts to the car going to an isolated destination to further investigate her sister’s disappearance and revisit one of the locations that the team covered. It feels fake as if the entire destination was computer generated from the road, the structure exterior and interior, etc. It is harder to stay into the movie because of this dramatic change in visual appearance from realism, industry standard commercial film quality to barely reaching “Tarot” (2024) levels. A record Kickstarter fundraiser helped make this movie happen, so it is not a deal breaker, but it is the only downside to the otherwise excellent narrative structure and constant shifting that keeps the audience on their toes. The drawback of making people sit up and pay attention is that attention invites a higher level of scrutiny, especially when two-thirds of the movie is essentially perfect.
The complete departure from anything remotely realistic to immersive supernatural shenanigans maybe too rapid. When the end arrives, it ties a bow on everything but feels rushed and abrupt like there should be more. It is a fun ride best enjoyed in the theater but leaves you vaguely wondering why you do not feel satiated after the experience. A certain je ne sais quoi is missing.
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It did feel as if the mythology needed more because why does a demon need a human being periodically when poor Wilson Miles (Charlie Talbert) seemed to have more time on the books to clock. The lesson cautions the extremes that women will go to have a baby at the expense of everyone else in their life. While the imagery of the stacked boxes in the crib felt central, not enough groundwork was done to firm up the connection between the care for her sister really subconsciously being about her nephew. Somehow that needed to come through more though that is the twist. She does not care about her sister but serving the demon. So what happened that night when she saw it in the window? There needed to be more development on why she would respond: jealously of her sister, thirst for attention, etc. That groundwork is not laid out. The mythology cannot do all the work. Clearly their mother is from the town, and when she moved away, their initials carved on trees led the demon to them so there is an underdeveloped story of grooming, abuse and sacrifice and not seeing children as a sufficient blessing just by existing. More thought needed to be put into hammering home Mia’s motives and their mother’s complicity that victimizes people like Riley, Wilson and the baby (Atticus Newell). The psychology of the horror was too undercooked.
