Shelby Oaks Is The Ultimate Horror Movie For The True Crime Obsessed [Fantastic Fest]

True crime has been broadly popular for some time in American culture, but it's experienced a real boom in recent years. Endless podcasts and even entire TV networks make a living off of it. Netflix is lousy with options for the true crime obsessed. "Shelby Oaks," the feature directorial debut from YouTuber Chris Stuckman, is designed to satisfy this very same audience.

The film, which recently played at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas, centers on Mia (Camille Sullivan), who has been obsessively searching for her missing sister for years. After new evidence surfaces under dark circumstances, the mystery begins to unravel, leading her to an unknown evil. The cast also includes Brendan Sexton III ("Russian Doll"), Michael Beach ("Tulsa King"), and Keith David ("The Thing").

Intentional or not, it feels as though Stuckman tailor-made this paranormal, missing-person mystery explicitly for the true crime generation. People who grew up watching "Unsolved Mysteries," who then ended up obsessed with "Serial" and "Making a Murderer." Not to spoil anything, but the first chunk of the movie plays out like a real deal true crime doc that is dissecting the found tapes from "The Blair Witch Project." As BJ Colangelo put it in her review of "Shelby Oaks" for /Film, it "completely reframes what is possible in found footage horror."

"Shelby Oaks" takes found footage elements and filters them through a true crime POV to create something that feels wholly unique. It also feels like it could scratch a real itch that true crime lovers rarely — if ever — get from cinematic narrative fiction. Not to comment on this movie's commercial prospects needlessly but, in that way, it feels like it could take off like a rocket if NEON gets it in front of the right eyeballs.

Admittedly, true crime isn't my thing. If anything, I largely go out of my way to avoid it. That having been said, I recognize that there is an appeal to it and, when done well, it can provide justice, cautionary tales, and a form of reality-based entertainment quite unlike anything else out there. That's part of what makes "Shelby Oaks" so unique and appealing to the right viewer. It takes on the disappearance at the center of it all through an investigative POV, just as any true crime documentary or dramatization would.

Yet, what's at the heart of the movie is decidedly, shall we say, not based on objectively real things. There's a supernatural layer to the proceedings. Even though the majority of true crime stories that take over in the popular zeitgeist aren't based in the metaphysical, there's a pretty healthy venn diagram of people who grew up watching "Ghost Hunters" and who also loved HBO's chronicle of Robert Durst, "The Jinx." The film plays out rather brilliantly in a way that scratches the middle of that very venn diagram.

My fiance watches an enormous amount of true crime. It fills her various streaming feeds constantly. While I was watching the movie one of my overarching, pervasive thoughts was, "She's gonna love this." Stuckman's movie may have started, somewhat humbly, with a very successful Kickstarter campaign. But there's a reason NEON picked it up. There's a reason they infused a lot of money into the project. There's a reason it's getting a big theatrical release. There's a huge audience for it. Not just the horror faithful but, more specifically, the true crime devotees. Be it a happy accident or a stroke of genius, Stuckmann has tapped into something very specific here. 

"Shelby Oaks" hits theaters on October 24, 2025.