Precursor

A classic AMC Discount Tuesday showing, beginning with a night of home made pizza enjoyed by me, my girlfriend, and our new movie companion: my girlfriend’s sister. The last movie we saw (pun intended) together was the fantastical Chainsaw Man: Reze Arc Movie, which we had plans to watch again with our old school friends the following day. It just so happened that while walking to our respective auditorium, that we passed one showing Chainsaw Man, as we could hear the beautiful score in the halls. This put me in a great mood as the scene the score belongs to brings me to tears just by thinking about it, which does sound strange that that would put me in a good mood, but it reminded me how a genius work of art can leave an permanent memory that pries its way into your every waking moment.

Shelby Oaks is a stupid movie that lingers where it shouldn’t, has a fundamental misunderstanding how to build tension, and devises a twist derived on nothing but shock value that I envy future me as I would have forgotten all about this movie.

Slow Beginnings

The movie opens up with a documentary style exposition dump explaining the disappearance of Mia and her friends. It is discovered that Mia’s friends are dead however Mia remains missing.

First off, the documentary style overstays its welcome. What should have taken a opening credit sequence turned into a drawn out concept that kills the opening pace of the movie. It feels even worse when you realize how little the documentary really matters.

The following is a recap of information I gathered during my first watching of the movie:

As a YouTube channel host, alongside 3 other hosts, she goes to haunted location and films their experiences. They weren’t popular at the time, however after their disappearance, they gained a cult following and detractors. Because of their popular disappearance, almost everyone across America knows about her and the other hosts disappearances and that a documentary about her disappearance is in production, because they found the bodies of the other hosts brutally disfigured at the scene of the crime. The police case went cold and most likely won’t be solved as her last recorded moments don’t reveal who kidnapped her, only a giant black figure staring at her through the window.

Do you want to know what part of that last paragraph served any consequence to the story?

As a YouTube channel host, alongside 3 other hosts, she goes to haunted location and films their experiences. They weren’t popular at the time, however after their disappearance, they gained a cult following and detractors. Because of their popular disappearance, almost everyone across America knows about her and the other hosts disappearances and that a documentary about her disappearance is in production, because they found the bodies of the other hosts brutally disfigured at the scene of the crime, but hers was never recovered. The police case went cold and most likely won’t be solved as her last recorded moments don’t reveal who kidnapped her, only a giant black figure staring at her through the window.

This edit is not hyperbolic. The other hosts don’t matter, her fans do not impact the story in any way, the police are non existent, and the documentary disappears after the introduction, only to come back in the final 10 minutes. The only things that mattered is that she went to haunted areas and recorded them. This explained why she was where she was, why she recorded herself instead of trying to hide and introduce our future antagonist of the movie. This wouldn’t be so much of an issue, if again, this didn’t take 15 minutes to get through. If you are going to fill the audience’s head with pointless information, at least do them the courtesy of not wasting too much of their time. It felt like padding for the sake of adding more importance to her disappearance.

There is also this really annoying editing trick at play during this sequence, where people will end a sentence and hold still in frame, then cut to another segment of the documentary, and not to… you know… the movie I came to see. This was infuriating. It felt like the director had a pre made to-do list of things to explain to the audience before the movie can even start, but we weren’t allowed to see that list, so all we can do is wait, not knowing when the director was going to be done talking.

The following is what I would have as a substitution in place of the entire documentary portion of the movie:

Mia sets up her webcam in the haunted house, clearly terrified. The perspective is an over the shoulder shot from behind her, looking towards her camera. She nervously recounts what has happened before she started recording, while looking behind whenever a loud noise introduces itself, the viewer’s POV following her perspective.

Repeat this formula until moments before she is taken, where we break this formula, causing a feeling of unease as we are no longer following the rules we have previously set for ourselves. We slow pan shot zooming into the camera lens, as we hear Mia’s footsteps walk to the door one final time, open the door, and finally she screams before whatever is taking her overpowers her and it taken away.

The movie cuts to a montage sequence while giving credit to the people responsible for making the film. The montage begins with the missing persons report coverage, which introduces the group as popular internet ghost hunters, then sequences to cop interviews explaining the public available information and how the last known location of Mia was discovered, and finally sequence conspiracy theorists attempting to solve the case, showing moments of interest within the recording of her final moments.

It starts the audience right in the action, it leaves room for questions from the audience, and most importantly, it doesn’t waste the viewer’s time on world building for the sake of world building. As someone who frequently plays Dungeons and Dragons with my friends, I get the urge to build up a world, but restraint is infinitely more impressive than over explanation. It shows not only a better understanding of your world by being able to convey more with less, it also shows the audience you respect their intelligence as they form the idea of your world on their own… which the director being a YouTube Film Critic, I don’t see them trusting their audience to think for themselves.

The Illusion of Holding Back

In the movie Longlegs, frequently throughout the movie you can see the dark figure of Satan in the background, with varying levels of subtlety. The movie almost never addresses the figure directly, however some shots guide the viewer’s gaze towards his presence.

Shelby Oaks tries to do the same thing with the Incubus demon, but there’s issues that greatly sets them apart from Satan in Longlegs… and its the Incubus’s glowing eyes, and the reliance on a CGI creature.

Unfortunately, the lower budget on CGI, the more it sticks out, and this is especially true in this movie. The shadows never conceal the creature in a good enough way where you could possibly miss it. Why they didn’t rely on a real prop is confusing since the creature is only seen in static poses, most of the time just standing idle. In the case that you didn’t manage to notice it standing out, don’t worry, the artistic choice of glowing orange eyeballs for every shot will make it nigh impossible to miss.

The Incubus also suffers from an issue that Satan had in Longlegs, and that his presence isn’t really a concern, its his followers that present themselves as a threat to any character. This causes a feeling of “He’s just standing there… MENACINGLY!”. The Incubus’s follower is a Hellhound that is also CGI, and I don’t really get why. I think renting out a German Shepard and using CGI to make it more demonic would have been less work, and resulted in a scarier experience. Because again, it is a lower budget CGI dog, it really stands out as not looking real.

Side Note: The Subversion of Expectation

I don’t really know where to put this however this was a really disappointing part of the movie for me, and I feel justified for feeling this way, I feel lied to by the movie’s location. This movie’s whole name being this ghost town in the world that once held significance to the main character, and that after a good amount of years, the main character gets a sign to return to this town after a person close to them is hinted to be in this town.

I’m sorry but this sounds like Silent Hill to me.

I don’t think its absurd of me to have expected the main character looking for clues regarding her missing sister being lost in this haunted ghost town. This never happens. She goes to a prison, a fair ground, and a haunted shack, but most of her discoveries happen in the library before she leaves. These locations are more so destination spots that she is guided to in order to go to the next spot. She doesn’t learn the creature’s origin, who kidnapped her sister, why the town became a ghost town, nothing. All of this was apparently preparation before arriving at Shelby Oaks.

Ok well there is one thing that the main character learns after arriving to Shelby Oaks.

The Grand Twist (Spoilers)

For those who aren’t familiar with the Incubus, the following is the first excerpt from Wikipedia.

In medieval Europe, union with an incubus was supposed by some to result in the birth of witches, demons, and deformed human offspring.

The main character discovers her sister was kidnapped to be impregnated with a demon by an Incubus, and that she apparently has had a ton of miscarriages. This heavy twist, was a bit undeserved. This movie has not demonstrated this level of depravity or disturbing imagery, not even close. We have only seen on instance of visible gore, from a distance and through film. This twist, for what its worth, was shocking, but it felt like it was shocking for the sake of shocking the audience.

This twist reveals that for the past 12 years, Mia has been raped and force to carry multiple times, all resulting in a miscarriage, to then immediately try again. They don’t show the action happening (thankfully), only showing the passage of time through pictures in a scrapbook.

Mia is found alive and has actually been able to give birth to a baby.

After a confrontation with the antagonist’s follower, the main character takes Mia and her baby back to the main character’s house, after a hospital visit. The main character does the most wildest thing and leaves the baby in Mia’s room. Why in the world would you ever do that? The main character knows the whole reason Mia was captured and kept was to give birth to this baby, AND SHE KEEPS IT WITH HER MENTALLY BROKEN SISTER??? She doesn’t even watch over Mia while she sleeps, she’s in a completely separate bedroom.

Mia tries to kill the baby (obviously), and the two characters fight which causes Mia falls out the window and dies to the Incubus’s followers. The main character becomes controlled by the Incubus, as the Incubus is now the baby, and the movie ends.

Final Remarks

This movie has ideas that don’t feel deserved, has terrible pacing issues, and misses the mark at building any form of suspense. If you want a better Incubus movie, watch Rosemary’s Baby. If you want a better indie horror movie still in theaters (at the time of writing), watch Good Boy.

2/10