Shelby Oaks (2025)
Premise: about twenty years ago the world saw the birth of something terrifying: youtube, which although initially was meant to be like, this fun place to watch videos of dogs farting… became the main website where you are directed to watch (…shivers) video essays!
But anyway, since that is only horrifying for some people like us here at the Impeccable-Taste HQ, the movie goes a different direction: back there at the beginning of the youtubes there was this silly small paranormal investigation channel, like, your ghost hunter type of deal. Except they all disappeared! And our lead, the sister of one of those uh investigative reporters has not stopped looking for her! Will she find some answers? Will it be creeeeepy?
Under 90 minutes? a minute over but this is a movie with about 15 minutes of credits (how the hell did that happen?), so I guess it is under an hour and a half, hurray!
Do they say the title? Oh, yes they do, almost right from the get go!
First thing I thought of:
Okay, more:
So this is a perfectly cromulent movie. There are some really cool things going on like how they play into some of the found footage tropes but then jump back to “normal movie” in a way that doesn’t seem jarring. There are some extremely creepy shots and scenes. I had been warned about a lot of jumpscares but let’s be honest, this is almost tame compared to some of the worst offenders. My main problem is that I knew exactly what was going to happen at any given point, like, as soon as Situation A happened I could tell it was going to go to Situation B, and from there to Situation C and so on. Which is fine, I suppose, but kinda makes the whole thing feel a bit emptier when you can tell they were aiming for some big mystery thing that gets revealed by the end. This was this director’s first movie so I am sure the next one will be very cool.
A simple way to improve it: the movie toys with the whole flanagan-ish “hidden ghosts” thing (it wasn’t a surprise to see he’s a producer here), but very early on it kinda forgets about it until basically the last stretch of the movie, where it just becomes “yup, there’s something in the background”. Let’s add more creepy stuff in the background that might or might not be something so I keep second guessing myself!
Trivia about the IMDb trivia:
In one of the posters promoting the movie, there are the names of all people contributing to the movie hidden in the poster. There were over 14,000 people included in making of the movie (including crowdfunding).
Oh, right, so that’s why the credits were almost 15 minutes long.
