Shelby Oaks - Il covo del male: a derivative horror that descends into clichés

An opening that starts with a mockumentary setup, designed to introduce the disappearance of the group Paranormal Paranoids, YouTubers specializing in paranormal investigations, who have been missing for twelve years in the ghost town of Shelby Oaks, Ohio. The bodies of three of them were found, but nothing more was ever known about the young Riley Brennan.

In Shelby Oaks - Il covo del male, the producers of the documentary dedicated to this mysterious event interview Mia, the sister of the only missing person who, even after so much time, has never lost hope of finding her. When strange events begin to occur near her home and the small community where she lives, Mia becomes convinced that her sister might still be alive and decides to go to Shelby Oaks herself, despite her husband Robert's objections. What she discovers will lead her to confront something unexpected and increasingly dangerous...

Shelby Oaks: Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

The famous YouTuber critic Chris Stuckmann makes his first feature film after a record-breaking Kickstarter campaign, but the result is less than what his fans might have expected. The project positions itself as a kind of continuation/evolution of the series he himself published online, but things did not go as hoped. With Shelby Oaks - Il covo del male we are in fact faced with a derivative pastiche, which certainly demonstrates a remarkable knowledge of the genre but stops there at theory, without a real cinematic understanding and staging.

The presence of Mike Flanagan, one of the gurus of contemporary horror, as executive producer had only raised the bar, and perhaps for this reason the finished product appears even more undeserving than expected. The hour and a half, barely, of viewing shows us a deeply problematic work, which mixes tones and genres without the necessary balance, letting suggestions take over a story that does nothing but repeat a long list of clichés. 

The main problem is evident from the first few minutes: the film is nothing more than a conscientious, extremely reasoned, exercise in style that does a meticulous yet anemic job of cutting and pasting, without ever finding its own voice. The declared inspiration from Lake Mungo (2008) is clear in the initial mockumentary structure, with obvious reminiscences from the timeless The Blair Witch Project (1999), but Stuckmann fails to replicate the chilling effectiveness of the prototypes. When the film abandons the fake documentary style after seventeen minutes to switch to a traditional narrative and representation, the operation completely loses the accumulated tension and transforms into a catalog of citations, used not as conscious homages but as narrative shortcuts, demonstrating a lack of style and ideas.

To Be or Not to Be

The screenplay, co-written by Stuckmann himself with his wife Samantha Elizabeth, uses found footage, the mystery of the missing sister, demonic possession, folk horror and so on, complete with unsettling hellhounds that threaten a protagonist increasingly overwhelmed by a series of disturbing events in the dead of night. But suspense is missing, motivation is missing, the primal heart of terror is missing: everything seems telegraphed, including that epilogue that opens up to a malevolent progeny, perhaps a starting point for hypothetical sequels.

But it is above all in the drastic change of visual language after the first act that Shelby Oaks - Il covo del male pays the biggest price, with the game of "now you see it, now you don't" and the view covered by first-person footage transforming into a more predictable showdown, where the audience has a wider field of vision and the reliance on easy jump-scares no longer frightens anyone. Probably, if the film had continued in its primary instinct, with POV dominating the narrative logic, we would have been talking about it in much less drastic tones: a choice that we hope the debut director will learn from for the future.