There is an irony here, a disjunction between audio and video: for while we can hear Riley speaking, her voice plays out to a blank screen, ensuring that it is certainly not the eyes of the viewer that are on her. When Riley does appear, seen in a room with a window in the background, she says, “I’m so scared” – and looks it too. Then the opposite effect takes place: for while we can see Riley, and even see her lips moving, her next words are muted by digital interference, as older footage of her on this video glitchily superimposes itself over the current recording – until finally the sound returns and we and Riley together hear the loud bang of someone or something breaking in.
Even as text authoritatively reveals that this is the last time the host of popular online ghost-hunting show Paranormal Paranoids was seen alive before her disappearance in 2008, viewers are being carefully introduced to the idea that mediated reality is always incomplete, while a bigger picture remains just beyond our grasp – on the other side, as it were, of cinema’s window. The first 17 minutes of Chris Stuckmann’s film come heavily mediated, with everything that we see being presented intradiegetically.
The ‘found footage’ of Riley’s last film with colleagues Peter (Anthony Bladasare), Laura (Caisey Cole) and David (Eric Francis Melaragni), in which they travel to ‘ghost town’ Shelby Oaks, on the edge of Darke County, Ohio, trying to get to the bottom of why it was abandoned en masse by its populace in the Nineties, is folded into footage from a ‘true crime’ documentary made 12 years later tracking the obsessive search of Mia (Camille Sullivan) for her lost sister.
The bloody bodies of the other three members of Paranormal Paranoids have since been found in a cabin near Shelby Oaks, but Riley remains a missing person, even if investigating Detective Burke (Michael Beach) is convinced that she is long dead. Meanwhile scouring of the found footage’s backgrounds, of records from Riley’s childhood, and of Mia’s own attested reminiscences about growing up with Riley, point to the possibility of something demonic at work in the shadows of this mysterious case.
All these materials are presented as intradiegetic – as always piecemeal, sometimes sensationalised film within film, packaged, like the episodes of Riley’s online shows, to combine information, investigation and entertainment. Yet 17 minutes in, a figure (Charlie Talbert) glimpsed in the found footage will turn up unannounced at Mia’s door and commit an act of violence – and as the opening credits finally appear on screen, there will be a radical shift to more ‘objective’ cinematic storytelling (along with some additional found footage). This will trace Mia’s own manic investigation, sans any camera crew, as she herself retraces Riley’s final footsteps in the decaying prison and woodland amusement park of Shelby Oaks, even as Mia herself rapidly descends into the longed-for maternity that over a decade’s worth of searching for her sister has stopped her pursuing with her increasingly sidelined husband Robert (Brendan Sexton III).
They say that you should do what you know, and so for his breakout feature Chris Stuckmann, co-writing with partner Sam Liz, first returns to the heady gonzo world of YouTube where he himself first made his name as both a filmmaker and critic. Yet he proves equally adept outside of this wheelhouse, as he heads even further back to the baleful influence of occult horror classics like Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973).
There is the sense here, as with the glitchy layerings of footage that opened Shelby Oaks, that the past is being folded into the present, and that the sketches of intrusive, terrifying dreams which Riley drew in her childhood are now serving as obscure storyboards for Mia’s unfolding experiences. Mia may be racing to solve a very cold case, but beyond the police files and documentary versions of what is going on, there is a different, alternative script at play, predetermining everything that happens as part of a nightmarish destiny. What emerges is unnerving and atmospheric, traumatising and terrifying – but also diabolically ambiguous, pushing sisterly and motherly bonds to the edge as truth slips between the cracks, and reality goes out the window.
Shelby Oaks had its UK première at FrightFest 2024, 23 August
