Shelby Oaks - Screen Love Affair

Fantasia 2024 Recap: A Celebration of Weird, Wild, and Wonderful Cinema

If you haven’t been checking in with us lately, we’ve been covering the 28th Fantasia Film Festival here in Montreal! The festival ran from July 18th until August 4th, 2024 and included everything from screenings to workshops to book launches. Overall, there were more than 125 features and 200 shorts shown throughout the festival. In the end, we were able to attend screenings of 12 features and 6 shorts, but we also attended ‘Her Horror Legacy’, a panel discussion on women directing horror, and got to interview the cast and director of Witchboard (2024) on the red carpet! In this article, we’ll recap our entire experience at Fantasia, and we’ll also include reviews for the shorts we got to see, talk about the panel Adriana attended, and get her thoughts on the remastered version of Cube that she also got to see at the festival! July 19 Carnage for Christmas dir. Alice Maio Mackay Adriana: Carnage for Christmas was a strange but fun way to start off the festival, given that it’s the middle of summer! It was a cool introduction for me to Alice Maio Mackay, who I am still flabbergasted is only 19 years old and already has five features under her belt. Anyway, this was a fun, ultra-low-budget Christmas slasher with some interesting visuals and some solid performances. Read my full review for more thoughts on this Australian holiday slasher! Elves on the Edge (Short) dir. Abby Lloyd Adriana: This short, in which a horny, Brooklyn-based elf gets it on with a Christmas tree after getting into a fight with her bandmates, is just as weird as it sounds! Writer/director/editor/star Abby Lloyd and her collaborator and composer Chris Retsina were in the house to introduce the short and provide some insight. It was apparently shot in two days on a true, self-funded, nothing budget. Gotta respect the hustle, even if the short wasn’t necessarily my thing. It was, however, the perfect accompaniment to Carnage for Christmas. Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (The Count of Monte Cristo) dir. Alexandre de La Patellière, Matthieu Delaporte Shea: I started things off with a bang with the French film, The Count of Monte Cristo! There was a lot to like about this one, too. It was the longest of all the movies I saw at Fantasia this year, but you don’t feel that length at all. The timelessness of the story, the great production value, and some captivating performances make this a movie worth your time. This is one of the most adapted stories of all time and even when it’s not being adapted directly, the themes and beats are used in plenty of other movies. Somehow, in spite of all that, this movie manages to feel fresh and was a great way to kick off my first Fantasia experience. Read the full review for more of my spoiler-free thoughts! July 20 Shelby Oaks dir. Chris Stuckmann Shea: This was my most anticipated movie of the whole festival! I’ve followed the writer/director of this movie, Chris Stuckmann, on YouTube for nearly fourteen years. Chris announced that he was making his first feature and eventually went to Kickstarter to get the funds he needed to finish his movie. For helping ignite my passion and love for cinema, I was more than willing to back the movie on Kickstarter and support Chris on this journey. After finally getting to see the movie at its world premiere, I’m happy to report that I was pleased with it! It wasn’t a perfect movie, but this is a great movie to start a career off with. I was most impressed with the confident direction from Stuckmann, because this didn’t feel like a feature debut at all. His genuine passion and love of film is apparent throughout Shelby Oaks, and I can’t wait to see what he makes next! Check out my full review for more of my spoiler-free thoughts! July 21 Dark Match dir. Lowell Dean Shea: You probably know by now that I love movies, but you might not be aware that I’m also a big wrestling fan (and so is my brother Ty). This horror movie is about a small town wrestling promotion that gets a gig in a town off the beaten path that turns out to be the home to a cult. The movie stars some personal favourites of mine, including WWE legend and current AEW wrestler Chris Jericho and GTA 5 and Better Call Saul cast member Steven Ogg. This was also a Canadian production, to boot. So to say I was stoked for this one would be an absolute understatement, and boy did this one not disappoint! Writer/director Lowell Dean brought a purity of vision and a singular focus to this movie that paid off in spades. This isn’t meant to be some piece of high art, but it completely succeeded at what it was trying to do and what it wanted to be. The Fantasia crowd was fantastic at every screening I went to, but this was one of two theatrical experiences at the festival that will stick with me forever. The crowd was eating up every moment in the movie and that rowdy enthusiasm added to the wrestling movie experience we were watching together. If you’re not a wrestling fan, though, there’s more than enough here that you’ll still love (as long as you love over-the-top characters and brutal gore)! For my full spoiler-free thoughts, check out my review. Hell is a Teenage Girl (Short) dir. Stephen Sawchuk Shea: Before Dark Match began, we were treated to a short film called Hell is a Teenage Girl. I admit, I’ve seen very few shorts in my life but the few that I did see at Fantasia did not disappoint, including this one! This one had a very Blumhouse vibe to it, as it matched the tone of a lot of the horror movies that the studio has produced over the years. This was a fairly standard horror/comedy/slasher, but the

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SLA at Fantasia: Shelby Oaks – Spoiler Free Movie Review

If you’ve ever talked to me about movies, chances are I have brought up a person whose videos I’ve watched on YouTube religiously for around fourteen years. That person is Chris Stuckmann. On a basic level, Chris and I shared the same taste in movies, but it was more his approach to talking about movies that really pulled me in. More than anything, Chris was a fan of movies first and foremost, and it was the passion above all else that has made me a long-time subscriber to his YouTube channel. In fact, it was Chris’s approach that inspired the very website you’re reading now. I started Screen Love Affair because I love movies and I wanted to share that feeling with the world. Like Chris, I wanted to put that passion out there with the hope that someone will discover a new movie that inspires them, because they read about it here. For Chris, though, talking about movies wasn’t enough. He has been a filmmaker since he was a kid and, as executive producer Mike Flanagan said tonight at the world premiere of Shelby Oaks, it was obvious that Chris would be here someday. I was able to attend the world premiere of Shelby Oaks as part of the coverage we’ve been doing of the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal. We got to hear from Mike Flanagan, who was also there to introduce Chris before the movie. The cast and crew in attendance stuck around for a Q&A afterwards as well. If you’d like to see that and our coverage of the rest of the Fantasia Film Festival, be sure to follow us on Instagram and X (formerly Twitter)! Shelby Oaks is a mystery-horror movie written, directed, and produced by Chris Stuckmann. The film stars Camille Sullivan as Mia, Brendan Sexton III as Mia’s husband Robert, Michael Beach as Detective Burch, Robin Bartlett as Norma, Keith David as Morton Jacobson, and Sarah Durn as Mia’s sister Riley. As for the plot, I’ll only provide you with a fraction of the synopsis because I think it gives you more than enough detail to know what kind of movie to expect: “Mia frantically searches for her sister Riley, after Riley ominously disappeared in the last taping of a show by a group of paranormal investigators called the Paranormal Paranoids.” Before we get into the review itself, rest assured that like all of my reviews, this will be SPOILER FREE. Also, for full disclosure, I was a backer on the Shelby Oaks Kickstarter campaign. I have no financial stake in the movie or anything, but when Chris announced the Kickstarter, it was important for me to give something back to the person that had given me so much for so many years. So, without further ado, let’s get Stuckmannized! My Thoughts To state it right at the top, I’m thrilled to report that this was a strong feature film debut for Chris Stuckmann! There was plenty of buzz and excitement around this one, especially amongst the sold out theatre in Montreal that came to watch the premiere. The performances were great all around, but the real standout here is the lead performance by Camille Sullivan. The whole movie rests on her shoulders and she does a fantastic job conveying the grief and the hope that her character carries throughout the movie. Another standout for me was Robin Bartlett as Norma. She had the entire theatre in the palm of her hand for every second she was on screen and was a genuine delight to watch. Sticking with what I liked, Stuckmann’s direction was probably the biggest highlight of the whole thing for me. There was a confidence I could feel throughout the movie with almost every shot. Stuckmann isn’t just a fan of horror movies, he’s a student of the game, and he knows how to use the frame and audio to create specific feelings of dread in the audience. Even I, as a seasoned horror veteran, found myself getting drawn into these moments and experiencing some genuine scares. When I anticipated a jump scare approaching, Stuckmann would linger a beat or two longer than most horror movies. This restraint causes just an extra notch of suspense that really goes a long way when it comes to building and then releasing tension. To contrast the horror, though, this movie is also really funny. There were plenty of laughs to be had, not in the form of annoying quips or forced jokes, but in recognizing the humour that can only be found in the horror genre. Oftentimes in horror movies, there are certain moments that are so absurd that you can’t help but laugh. Shelby Oaks succeeds where most horror movies fail in this regard, because it recognizes the humour in those moments, while lesser movies insist on trying to make the absurd scary, which causes a disconnect with the audience. Another highlight was just the perspective of the movie itself. I won’t give anything away, but this was one of the best and most unique aspects of the movie. In a genre as populated as horror, it’s always impressive to me when you can do something new, and that’s what Stuckmann was able to do here. When it came to the sound, I was a little more mixed. One of the things that really takes me out of a tense scene in a horror movie is when I notice the audio drop out completely. It’s not just a subconscious thing that makes it easier for me to pay attention to every little sound, it makes me acutely aware of the fact that something loud is going to appear on the screen suddenly. I lose all sense of tension as I sit there simply waiting for that thing to happen. When it comes to the sound mixing and design, I find a more subtle approach, with a very limited score throughout, keeps me a little less aware and prepared for