Found footage took off for a minute there because it reset our idea of what realism looked like in the context of horror. And if you don’t think realism is important in horror, think again. Horror movie monsters are, by their nature, fantastical, but the more they feel like they could really be in our world, the more they scare us. So grainy images of them in the background of a found video tape accomplishes that much better than even good visual effects. What’s on the tape seems “real,” and so does the monster.

The new movie Shelby Oaks has about a 15-minute found footage prologue. In fact, this prologue goes on for so long that by the time the movie’s actual opening credits begin rolling, you’ve already decided it’s just a found footage horror movie, and possibly a promising one.

The footage is of a paranormal investigative team who disappeared while visiting the abandoned community of Shelby Oaks – think a soft reboot of The Blair Witch Project – possibly at the hands of something that can’t quite be seen in the corner of the frame. There’s also documentary style footage with talking heads, and updates on the case provided by local TV news reporters and anchors, so then you think you’re watching the cousin of the found footage movie, the faux documentary, which also has promise, or at least did once.

Once the credits roll, the film’s narrative framework shifts. We’re actually going to follow one of the talking heads in the documentary – Mia (Camille Sullivan), the sister of one missing investigator – in just an ordinary narrative horror movie, in which found footage makes a periodic appearance. YouTube film critic Chris Stuckmann, making his feature debut as a writer and director, thinks he’s being clever by these shifts, the last of which is the final one. What he’s really doing is drawing a distinction between the purportedly real footage of the recovered video and the stupendous fakery that surrounds it.

Riley Brennan (Sarah Durn) was, or is – no one knows if they’re still alive – the lead personality behind the Paranormal Paranoids, who purport to interrogate the local legends of ghosts and other unnatural forces that haunt various old buildings and the like. Their show appears on YouTube. Needless to say, most such groups are charlatans, and there may be some of that going on here. But Riley may also actually have some sort of ability to see things that other people can’t.

As we learn from her sister Mia, Riley used to describe some sort of fiend looking in through her childhood bedroom window, leaving actual evidence of its existence through a cracked pane. That the window was on the second floor made this all the more chilling. Mia believes Riley’s left her a coded message that this monster may be back, so when a man shows up at Mia’s house – during a break from filming a documentary about the Paranormal Paranoids – with a video tape showing more of what happened to the team, Mia’s on the hunt to find them.

From the moment we see Mia interacting with new found footage video of her sister, we know that this is not the right dramatic choice. Horrors seen, or usually hinted at, within the margins of grainy video tape are scary to us because we, as viewers, are interfacing with them directly, our imaginations filling in the details of what we can’t see. Shelby Oaks adds a layer of removal by showing us Mia’s reactions to these videos. And because Camille Sullivan will never be mistaken for an Oscar-winning actress, her reactions to the video inevitably cannibalise ours. We’re reacting to her reactions more than we’re reacting to the video, and her reactions aren’t great.

Stuckmann’s cinematographer on this film is Andrew Scott Baird, and we might assume he presided over both the found footage and the straightforward narrative. If so, the first version of his technique dwarfs the second. The found footage is shot with evident skill, reminding us what first drew us to this form. The straightforward narrative is stiff and stagey, and it’s not helped by some other inferior performances, particularly that of Mia’s husband, played by Brendan Sexton III, who has certainly been around long enough to give a better performance than this. While we’re on performance for a moment, Shelby Oaks also features pointless cameos from Keith David and Michael Beach, neither of which contribute anything of value.

The fake look of this movie goes along perfectly with its fake thinking. There’s a point where Mia has to go to an abandoned correctional facility to pursue a lead, and it’s just as nightmarish and grisly as you might expect. The fact that it is perfectly open to whoever wanted to explore it – teens for a laugh, derelicts to potentially live there – is the fake part. There’s not even a fence to keep people out, but more to the point, there’s not even a fence to keep people in. This was a correctional facility, right? You kind of need walls in a place like that. (Oh and of course she goes at night, which is just all the sillier.)

The story shambles forward in its struggle to reach feature length, which is even more noticeable when you consider that 15 minutes of its brief 99-minute running time were expended on the prologue, before the story proper even got started. The idea of who this monster is, what it can do, whether it’s real, all keep shifting awkwardly as you feel Stuckmann fishing around for any rules to govern this entity, or any point at all.

And that’s really the final question anyone should ask about Shelby Oaks: Why was it made? A team of disappeared paranoid investigators, using an outdated format for making horror movies — and not even using it properly — is about as turn-of-the-century an idea as you can get. Anachronisms within the horror landscape can work well if they are smartly conceived, but Stuckmann, a very popular personality within YouTube film criticism, has filled the movie with dumb ideas that don’t work. Some people who gain fame on YouTube undoubtedly can use their extensive knowledge of the thing they love to actually excel at it, but Chris Stuckmann is no Kogonada, and Shelby Oaks is not worth anyone’s time.

 

Shelby Oaks opens today in cinemas.