Previously: “Backrooms (Found Footage).”
Do you remember a ghost hunting YouTube channel called Paranormal Paranoids? According to those who recall watching it, it was originally active circa 2008 — that is, during the very early days of YouTube — and featured the mostly-lighthearted escapades of a group of four young-ish, probably 20-something adults who lived in Ohio as they traipsed around reportedly haunted locations.
Like a lot of early YouTubers, though, they sort of… dropped off the map after a while. The channel doesn’t exist anymore, although whether it was deleted directly by the Paranormal Paranoids team or whether it was a casualty of YouTube’s inactive accounts policy remains to be seen. The team’s members — Riley Brennan, Peter Bailey, Laura Tucker, and David Reynolds — also don’t seem to have any other online presences these days.
Taken at face value, none of that seems too far out of the ordinary; people often change the way the engage with the internet as they get older — something which, I would argue, is particularly true of folks who were early in adulthood at the particular point in time when Paranormal Paranoids was active — and in recent years, many have been actively choosing to limit or eliminate their online presence as concerns about privacy have grown.
But here’s the thing: Prior to their disappearance, the team had been hyping up a trip to a location in Ohio called Shelby Oaks. That investigation never materialized — which, combined with the fact that seemingly no one within the group’s small but dedicated fan community has heard from them since, has prompted some to theorize that the team’s lack of activity might have been more than just a calculated withdrawal from online life. It might indicate that Riley, Peter, Laura, and David disappeared altogether — not just from the internet, but from the world as a whole — under mysterious and potentially dangerous circumstances.
[Like what you read? Check out Dangerous Games To Play In The Dark, available from Chronicle Books now!]
If you don’t remember Paranormal Paranoids, though, there’s a reason for that: It never actually existed. Originally released via YouTube between late May and early July of 2021, with supplemental narrative tidbits dropped on Twitter, Paranormal Paranoids — italicized this time, as it refers to a full-length work, rather than a group of people or a channel name — is a fictional found footage horror web series; it also serves as the basis for a forthcoming feature film, Shelby Oaks, helmed by well-known YouTuber and film critic Chris Stuckmann.
But — much like the supposed disappearance of the Paranormal Paranoids team members — there’s more to this series than meets the eye. Sure, on the surface, it seems to follow the same playbook laid out by all of its predecessors; when you look at it all a little more closely, however, it becomes apparent that Paranormal Paranoids and its creators know that the work exists in a market that’s saturated — oversaturated, even — with the kind of story it’s telling. Accordingly, it anticipates our reactions to it, and it uses our own expectations against us in order to flip the script a bit. What’s more, it does so in service of a very particular end point — which is where Shelby Oaks comes into the picture.
This time around, I don’t think we’re looking at the standard YouTube-to-feature pipeline, wherein a web series is created, goes viral, and is subsequently optioned for or adapted into a feature film; furthermore, although I’ve seen Paranormal Paranoids described as an “online marketing campaign,” I don’t think it’s quite that simple, either. Based on what we have of the series, and what we know of the film, they’re much more firmly connected than either of those two scenarios position them to be.
My theory? Is that they were developed together, as two parts of a single project — two parts that are deeply, deeply entwined. Taken together, Paranormal Paranoids and Shelby Oaks take the existing structures and expectations surrounding how horror web series and feature films have been connected and interacted in the past and use them in ways we haven’t quite seen before. And what the project as a whole proves is that it’s still possible to break new ground, even in an oversaturated genre — as long as you’re willing to think outside the box a little.
The Same, But Different: Paranormal Paranoids And The Continued Evolution Of The Found Footage Web Series
In the grand tradition of the many, many fictional found footage horror web series that have come before it, Paranormal Paranoids is presented in such a way as to prompt viewers to ask one very specific question: Is Paranormal Paranoids real?
To be perfectly honest, we’re so far into the fictional found footage horror web series era that, when I first started looking into Paranormal Paranoids, I was somewhat surprised this question was in the mix at all. At this stage in the game — the 2020s, 10 to 15 years after genre pioneers like In The Dark aka the Louise Paxton mystery (2007), Marble Hornets (2009) and all the other early Slenderman series, “No Through Road” (2009), the Ben DROWNED saga (2010), and their comrades set the rules and the standards for everything to come — I would’ve thought that it would be pretty clear from the get-go that Paranormal Paranoids wasn’t actually real.
Indeed, There’s a lot about the structure and trajectory of Paranormal Paranoids that reminds me of In The Dark, particularly on the first watch: It looks real enough to the casual viewer on the surface; if you’re familiar with common tropes in ghost stories and supernatural horror, it quickly becomes apparent that it’s fiction; and, sometime later, the fact that it’s fiction becomes indisputable — due, it’s true, to a fairly varied body of evidence, but with one particular piece of the puzzle mattering perhaps the most: The identification of the actor who plays the series’ lead. You’ll recall that In The Dark’s protagonist, Louise Paxton, was later identified as actor Zoe Richards; similarly, in Paranormal Paranoids, Riley is now known to be actor and writer Sarah Durn. (Fun fact: In addition to her acting work, Durn is also on staff at Atlas Obscura, a longtime favorite of mine for curious and unusual travel-centric stories.)
In The Dark isn’t the only early found footage web series Paranormal Paranoids echoes, either; there’s also a lot of OG Slenderman series Marble Hornets in its DNA. Like Marble Hornets, Paranormal Paranoids features a mostly offscreen character who gives us our frame — and, crucially, provides us with access to the footage and other material we’re viewing. In Marble Hornets, it’s Jay, who tells us at the start of the series that he’s going through old footage collected from his missing former friend and collaborator, Alex, and uploading it to YouTube in the hopes that he’ll be able to figure out what happened to Alex; and here, it’s someone calling herself JesstheParanoid, a former fan who has been collecting evidence in an attempt to discover where the Paranormal Paranoids might have gone, much of which takes the form — again — of videos uploaded to YouTube.
Also like Marble Hornets, Paranormal Paranoids also features a mysterious, supplementary figure that builds out the frame: N01R^+, who supplies Jess — and, therefore, us — with additional footage to which she wouldn’t otherwise have access. Here. N01R^+ plays a similar role as the totheark YouTube channel, which supplied the Marble Hornets with supplementary material, as well.
But, despite all these similarities — which, collectively, were what made me so surprised that there was ever a question about whether Paranormal Paranoids was fiction or reality — I eventually started to realize that there’s something a little different about how the “Is it real?” question is posed this time ’round: Whereas earlier series like In The Dark had us asking, “Is it real? It looks so real that it must be real!”, Paranormal Paranoids has us saying, “This obviously isn’t real. Or… is it?”
Or, to put it another way: Previously, we were coming at the “Is it real?” question from a starting position of trusting its claims of veracity, and gradually coming to the realization that it was fiction. With Paranormal Paranoids, however, we’re coming at it from a starting position of distrusting its claims of veracity, and gradually starting to ask ourselves if maybe it might not be real after all.
Have You Seen Them?: The Paranormal Paranoids Uploads And Timeline
It’s perhaps worth noting that Paranormal Paranoids actually begins in a different medium than either In the Dark or Marble Hornets did: Rather than finding its home right on YouTube from the start, it sees its beginnings on Twitter. This, however, is more due to the fact that Twitter itself was in quite a different place in 2021 than it was in the mid- to late-2000s, circa In The Dark and Marble Hornets. Video, for instance, wasn’t even viewable directly within the platform via embeds until 2010, let alone uploadable (mobile video uploads didn’t arrive until 2015) — so although many of the videos that make up Paranormal Paranoids are first introduced to viewers directly on Twitter before being uploaded to YouTube, In The Dark and Marble Hornets just didn’t have that option. The technology didn’t exist yet.
(Before you point it out: Yes, Marble Hornets grew out of the SomethingAwful forums, which is sort of analogous to Twitter in this situation; given the exclusivity of SA, though, and the fact that Marble Hornets debuted as part of collective building of the Slenderman mythos following Eric Knudsen’s initial creation of the creature, I would argue it’s a little bit different. The SA posts weren’t widely available to the viewing public, which necessarily meant that YouTube became the series’ main method of communication very early on.)
And yet, much of the series still follows the same roadmap laid out by these early series in terms of how it unfolds to viewers.
We start, as these things often do, by meeting our narrator. She calls herself JesstheParanoid, and uses a picture of Gillian Anderson as Dana Scully from The X-Files as her online avatar.
The @jesstheparanoid Twitter account was created in May of 2021, with Jess’ first two threads—one a false start, the other the story’s proper beginning — arriving on May 19. In these threads, she explains her purpose:
When she was a kid, maybe 12 or 13 years old, she was obsessed with the ghost hunting YouTube channel Paranormal Paranoids, which she recalls having been active in the mid-to-late-2000s. After the group stopped posting videos and stopped responding to viewer comments, she became equally obsessed with trying, as she puts it, to “put together the pieces” regarding what might have happened to them. She eventually lost interest in the whole thing, as kids often do — but recently, her parents delivered a box full of stuff from her childhood bedroom to her, which included a bunch of burned CDs with Paranormal Paranoids media stored on them. She’s now back on the case, trying to figure out what might have happened — and since no one she personally knows remembers the channel, she’s putting a call out via Twitter to see if anyone else out there might have additional information.
A day later, she also posts a screenshot she found saved in her old files of a Yahoo Answers question posted around 2009, asking if anyone knew what had happened to the PP team. A response visible in the screenshot notes, “I think their last blog post before radio silence said they were going to some place called Shelby Oaks. Never heard of it.” Jess hasn’t either; she asks in a follow-up tweet if anyone has heard of it, noting that a quick Google search for the term wasn’t terribly helpful.
From there, things start to get weird, fast: Another recently-created Twitter account, @lookingforpara7, whose display name is N01R^+, begins replying to Jess’ tweets with clips of footage — first a Q&A that Paranormal Paranoids leader Riley posted to the channel once, but then with what look like home movies recorded by Riley and fellow PP members Peter, David, and Laura. Jess is fairly certain these home movies were never posted to the Paranormal Paranoids channel, and isn’t sure how N01R^+ could have gotten a hold of them. By May 23, she’s beginning to think of N01R^+ more as a stalker than a helper.
The series begins to take the familiar form of a YouTube-based horror web series on May 24, 2021, when Jess begins uploading the videos she’s collected so far to her channel, @jesstheparanoid6180. The first three are all re-uploads of the footage N01R^+ has sent her: The Q&A; a conversation between Riley and Peter shot by David about Riley’s sister, Mia, and Mia’s new boyfriend Robert; and a clip of Riley playing the guitar and singing while sitting on her bedroom floor. They’re all posted the same day.
The next day, May 25, Jess tweets that she’s manage to get her hands on an external CD drive, and that she’s trying to extract stuff from the CDs in the box her parents gave her. They’re badly scratched, but by using toothpaste to patch the scratches, she’s able to get them working — and on May 26, she gives us an upload of a full Paranormal Paranoids episode.
Jess titles the upload “Paranormal Paranoids – Mary Talbert Episode.” In it, we see the group travel to a forest near Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio said to be haunted by a young woman — the titular Mary Talbert — who allegedly died there in 1994. The video is low-budget and silly — fun in the way that most amateur-created videos were in the early days of YouTube. A handful of shots do feature what looks like the spectral figure of a young woman just at the edges of the screen; however, due to the tongue-in-cheek tone of the video, it’s not clear to viewers whether they’re setups or camera trickery carried off by the group, or whether they’re “real.”
Three additional Paranormal Paranoids episodes arrive on June 5. One of them, which investigates a shed in the woods somewhere that was, again, said to have played host to a tragic death, is unremarkable; the other two, however, seem a bit more sensational. In one, where the group explores a defunct prison, Riley experiences a sudden drop in temperature — cold enough to cause her breath to fog visibly on camera — which none of the others seemingly feel; additionally, the team’s camera malfunctions, which we’re informed about via a title card stating, “The next few minutes of tape recorded absolutely nothing, until it began working again.”
(It’s not clear which prison they’re at, but for what it’s worth, Ohio has… a lot of them. Two of the most notable are the Ohio State Penitentiary in Columbus, which was open from 1834 to 1984, and the Ohio State Reformatory, also known as the Mansfield Reformatory, located in Mansfield and in operation from 1886 to 1990. Mansfield was the primary shooting location for The Shawshank Redemption, Frank Darabont’s 1994 adaptation of the Stephen King novella Rita Hayworth And The Shawshank Redemption.)
In the other, where they investigate an elementary school with a sordid past… well, let’s just say that they quickly find out that they’re not alone as they explore the basement of the not-so-empty building:
Again: Could it be a hoax perpetrated by the team? Of course — but footage supplied by N01R^+ quashes that idea pretty definitively.
Because, yes, throughout all of these Paranormal Paranoids episode uploads, N01R^+ has continued, creepily, to tweet footage and other tidbits at Jess. First, there’s a weird drawing of a monstrous figure Riley apparently made, which N01R^+ later says they have “in [their] possession”; then, there’s an 11-second clip of what looks like security camera footage of the team fueling up at a gas station; and lastly, there’s home movie footage shot by Mia — Riley’s sister — of Riley creating the drawing N01R^+ previously tweeted, and explaining that it’s a figure she’s been seeing in her dreams. Jess posts the gas station footage to YouTube on June 1, and the drawing video on June 4 — both sitting between the Mary Talbert episode and the remaining three PP episodes.
It doesn’t stop there, either. About a week goes by without any video activity from either Jess or N01R^+ — but on June 11, N01R^+ drops the first of a series of videos on Twitter which, as I mentioned, collectively put the kibosh on the idea that the activity documented in the Paranormal Paranoids episodes Jess has managed to recover was hoaxed.
Like many of the previous N01R^+-supplied videos, it’s a home movie — something that doesn’t look like it was ever intended to be viewed by the public. In it, Riley and Peter sit on a porch at night while Riley describes dreams she had as a teenager — dreams in which she says she had premonitions of what she now knows to have been the locations the Paranormal Paranoids team has been exploring. Dreams in which she recalls a shadowy man peering in at her through her window. N01R^+’s commentary on the video reads, “She knows. She remembers.” Jess uploads it to YouTube on June 11.
Then, a few days later, on June 14, N01R^+ tweets another handful of videos that are clearly part of that same conversation between Riley and Peter, which Jess splices all together and uploads to YouTube on June 15. In them, Riley and Peter discuss a lot of things, chief of which is the fact that Riley wants to pull back from Paranormal Paranoids and take a break — because, she says, all of the weird things that have been happening during their investigations are getting to be too much for her; she’s worried that “things are attracted her,” and that by continuing, she’d be putting all of them in danger. For this reason, she doesn’t want to keep going — and specifically, she doesn’t want to do the upcoming Shelby Oaks investigation. Peter keeps pushing her, though (which I HATE for her — dude, read the room) — and although eventually, he relents, he specifies that he’s willing to put things on hold “after Shelby Oaks.”
It’s not clear what or where Shelby Oaks is — but Riley clearly does not want to go there. Notably, this video is also the first time “Shelby Oaks” has been mentioned by any of the Paranormal Paranoids members themselves, although it certainly won’t be the last.
On June 16, N01R^+ tweets two photos — a Missing Persons poster depicting the Paranormal Paranoids pinned to a tree, and a collapsing shack in the woods — along with the message, “Have you seen them?” And here, again, we have a mention of “Shelby Oaks”: It’s listed on the Missing Persons poster as the location the Paranormal Paranoids were last seen near.
And on June 24, Jess tweets something horrifying: “Oh god they found my email” — “they” being, presumably, N01R^+. She follows this tweet up with a screenshot of her inbox, displaying a video file shared with her via Dropbox titled “RileysLastMessage.mov.” And when she finally watches the video, she appears to regret it deeply; her tweet linking to the upload on her YouTube channel notes, “Please don’t watch it unless you’re ready. I wish someone had warned me.”
It’s not clear precisely what’s going on in the footage, but we can hazard a guess: It’s what happened at Shelby Oaks. Riley — terrified, crying, in very bad shape — appears in an indoor location, possibly a cabin, definitely a residential space; it’s night; there’s screaming, and what sounds like dogs barking, and lights going on and off on their own, and mysterious, threatening figures, and — well, suffice to say that, based on what we can hear from her when she disappears through a doorway and of frame, there’s a reason the Paranormal Paranoids seemed to have dropped out of existence after the Shelby Oaks investigation.
N01R^+ tweets one last pair of videos on July 4, which Jess uploads to YouTube later that same day. It’s a vlog from Riley that seems to have been made prior to the last video — the “Riley’s Last Message” one — describing her current state (not good) and discussing the group’s next investigation, which she says will be Shelby Oaks.
And… that’s kind of where we end for now: Knowing that she and the team will go to Shelby Oaks, and that they will not return from it.
At this point, I’m not actually terribly interested in digging too far into the details here — who or what the monsters are, that kind of thing — because that’s not actually what’s interesting to me. The broad strokes are enough for us to get what’s going on; besides, folks who are super into the ARG aspects of the story have done a lot of that work already.
For instance, the shack and the Missing Persons poster have both been located in the real world; the phone number on the Missing Persons poster has been called; and it’s pretty clear that Shelby Oaks is a place name — likely a town, a census-designated place, or similar — due to the way it’s rendered on the Missing Persons poster (“Shelby Oaks, OH”). People have brightened up bits of the videos, showing creatures lurking in the darkness at key points in several of the videos — such as the prison investigation video and “Riley’s Last Message” — and theorized endlessly about the presence of Mia’s and Riley’s names being written on the wall in the prison episode. All that is out there for you to find, if that’s where your interests lie; this Google doc and the r/ParanormalParanoids subreddit are good places to start if you want to look into it further.
I also don’t really feel the need to get into the face reveal video Jess posted in September of 2021, after news of the Shelby Oaks feature had already been announced; it has little bearing on the story itself thus far and mostly just seems to exist as a way to introduce the actor who will be playing her in Shelby Oaks. (It’s Lauren Ashley Berry, for the curious.)
The questions we have right now? I’m fairly certain that most of them are going to be answered by Shelby Oaks. For me, trying to figure out the story of the film before actually seeing it just… takes away the fun of, y’know, actually seeing it. Rather than trying to predict the plot of the film, I’m content to wait and see what the filmmakers have cooked up on their own.
What I am interested in, though, is how Paranormal Paranoids and Shelby Oaks fit together — because from where I’m sitting, that’s where things start to get really interesting.
If that’s also interesting to you… let’s continue, shall we?
The Shelby Oaks Connection
So: Where does the upcoming feature fit in? How will Shelby Oaks connect to Paranormal Paranoids? Will viewers need to have knowledge of one in order to understand the other, and vice versa? And why am I so convinced that the plan behind Paranormal Paranoids was always for it to be paired directly with Shelby Oaks?
Well, first off — and perhaps most importantly — we have to consider the timing of everything. To me, it was a dead giveaway that the web series and the feature were developed as two parts of a single project: The first video upload in the series was on May 24, 2021; the last one was on July 4, 2021; and the feature was announced by Deadline just two days later, on July 6, 2021. That’s really fast — and the bottom line is that the film industry just doesn’t move quickly that quickly, even in the indie sphere, and even when it involves a wildly popular viral web series.
Consider, for instance, Kane Parson’s Backrooms: Found Footage series: Parsons first began uploading the series in January of 2022; it went viral within a matter of days; it sustained its popularity as it continued on — but the announcement that a feature was in the works based on it didn’t arrive until February of 2023, more than a full year after the series’ debut.
For a feature connected with a web series to be announced just a little more than a month after the web series in question began, and just days after it reached its conclusion? It would have had to have been part of the plan for that to be the case all along. There’s just no other way it could have happened that quickly.
I do give Chris Stuckmann credit for his dedication to the bit; in his “I’m Directing A Movie!” announcement video, which he posted to YouTube the same day the Deadline announcement about Shelby Oaks was published, he sticks to the fiction, framing the story as an existing, real-life mystery to which the production company Paper Street Pictures had acquired the rights.
But, other bits and bobs have appeared over time that continue to pole holes into the bit. For instance, in a behind-the-scenes video about the making of Shelby Oaks currently available on Stuckmann’s YouTube channel, Stuckmann notes that he “started working on this movie before COVID” — a statement which is in direct opposition to the framing in “I’m Directing A Movie,” where the timeline he lays out places Shelby Oaks’ development after the start of the pandemic. Additionally, some eagle-eyed viewers have commented that the game room featured in the Paranormal Paranoids episode “Riley talks about her sister Mia” looks very much like Stuckmann’s own game room, as seen in numerous videos on his own channel.
But if none of that is enough — if there’s any doubt still left in your mind at this point about whether Paranormal Paranoids is really a work of fiction, or whether it’s been a project of Stuckmann’s the whole time — two pretty definitive pieces of evidence point to both as fact: First, there’s record in the online database Open Corporates that an LLC, or limited liability company, called Shelby Oaks LLC was incorporated in October of 2020 — that is, prior to the release of Paranormal Paranoids in 2021 — with Chris Stuckmann listed as its agent; and second, Stuckmann has, in fact, confirmed that he made Paranormal Paranoids in an AMA conducted in the r/movies subreddit on March 21, 2022. When asked during this AMA by Redditor u/Realshow, “How much involvement did you have in the Paranormal Paranoids ARG?”, Stuckmann replied, “I filmed everything on tape, used a camcorder from 2006, and edited them on a Mac from 2006. I was there for every single moment of it.”
Why does this matter? Because establishing Stuckmann as the creator of Paranormal Paranoids is what allows us to consider Paranormal Paranoids and Shelby Oaks as two pieces of the same whole.
Because here’s the thing: Paranormal Paranoids has gaps. And, based on the tidbits of information that have been provided for us about Shelby Oaks thus far, I think Shelby Oaks is going to fill in those gaps — and together, the series and the feature will form one, complete story that is much, much greater than the sum of its parts.
Context Is Key: How Paranormal Paranoids And Shelby Oaks (Might) Fit Together
This, of course, prompts the question: What do we know about Shelby Oaks so far? The answer is, not a ton… but not nothing, either.
We know, for instance, that it’s not just in the can, but well on the road to release, despite experiencing a few bumps in the road along the way:
Initially, Shelby Oaks was meant to go into production in 2021, but suffered a delay due both to money and the looming prospect of a strike by the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) labor union, which represents a huge swathe of behind-the-scenes workers across multiple disciplines in the entertainment industry. (The strike was averted in October and an agreement reached between IATSE and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, or AMPTP.)
In March of 2022, the film launched a Kickstarter campaign to come up with the funds needed; overwhelming successful, the campaign raised more than $1 million, allowing principal photography finally to take place between May 9 and June 5, 2022. The picture was locked as of June 2023, but although the hope was initially that the film would be ready for release in the fall of 2023, the lengthy SAG/AFTRA and WGA strikes throughout the latter half of 2023 delayed the timeline quite a bit.
Although Stuckmann himself wasn’t yet a member of the WGA at the time of the strikes (he’ll be eligible to join once Shelby Oaks does finally see release), an end-of-July update to the Kickstarter page stated that the entire Shelby Oaks team was in full support of the strikes and would not be selling the film to an AMPTP company until the strikes were over. Thankfully, the strikes did eventually conclude to enormous success on the part of the unions — a very big deal and a very good thing! — allowing Shelby Oaks to continue forging on ahead.
(Stuckmann’s video on the strikes is an excellent explainer of why they were so important, by the way, so it’s worth checking out even now after the fact.)
And things for Shelby Oaks are looking very bright, indeed; in May of 2024, it was announced that Mike Flanagan (Mike! Flanagan!), Trevor Macy, and Melinda Nishioka of Intrepid Pictures had come aboard as executive producers. So, hopefully we can expect some more news about what’s next for the film soon.
We know a bit about its style, and a rough idea of the plot:
The Shelby Oaks website describe the film as having been “shot as a traditional feature, but with some elements of found footage.” It will tell the story of the missing Paranormal Paranoids team, “the dark legacy they uncovered, and the far-reaching effects their investigation has as Mia searches for his sister Riley, the lead paranormal investigator, 12 years later,” per the film’s synopsis — a “dark legacy” that stretches into Mia and Riley’s past, as Mia “uncovers evidence of a hidden supernatural evil” that’s been plaguing the sisters since childhood.
We know that Mia isn’t the only character from the sidelines of Paranormal Paranoids who will step into the spotlight in Shelby Oaks:
In Episode 1 of the series of behind-the-scenes videos Stuckmann has been posting to YouTube, we see location scouting for what’s referred to as “the Brennan house, where Mia and Robert live”— meaning that Mia and Robert, the new boyfriend Riley mentions in the Paranormal Paranoids video “Riley talks about her sister Mia,” are not only still together 12 years on, but have built a home and a life together.
(It’s worth noting that the YouTube videos are shorter versions of much longer making-of videos; these longer versions were one of the rewards for backing the Kickstarter campaign. I didn’t back the campaign, so I’m working with the shorter videos — but even though they’re all under six minutes apiece, they do still offer quite a bit of information.)
We know, too, that Jess will be a character in the film: She’s referred to in the behind-the-scenes videos several times, notably in Episode 2.
We also know a handful of locations that will be used: Episodes 1 and 4 make note of the fact that Mansfield Reformatory, aka the Shawshank Redemption prison, is a shooting location; furthermore, an abandoned amusement park seen briefly in Episode 1 that looked to be Chippewa Lake Park is later confirmed to be as such in Episode 4, as well.
That’s… actually quite a lot, when taken together. And much of it serves to underline what I think Paranormal Paranoids really is in relation to Shelby Oaks.
It’s clear that Shelby Oaks isn’t simply “based on” Paranormal Paranoids. I don’t think it’s a straightforward prequel to Shelby Oaks, either. Nor do I think it’s simply a marketing campaign. (Although there is something to be said for a good marketing campaign, boiling Paranormal Paranoids down to a marketing campaign alone diminishes the strength of the storytelling—or at least, it does to me.) The series reads as part of the story itself — and that’s where my theory lands:
I think Paranormal Paranoids is context for Shelby Oaks.
Paranormal Paranoids shows us the “before,” so to speak — that is, what was going on with the team circa 2008-2009 and the circumstances surrounding their disappearance — and although we do see a small portion of whatever tragedy befell them in “Riley’s Last Message,” all we really know at this point is that Something Happened. Shelby Oaks, I suspect, will fill in the gaps left by the web series about what transpired in 2008 — that it will reveal to us what the Something that Happened actually was.
That’s not all, though. The feature isn’t set up to resolve only the story of Riley and the Paranormal Paranoids team; it’s also set up to resolve the stories of everyone else involved, too. Mia, you see, is part of the story. By extension, Robert is, too; they share a life, after all, and Riley’s disappearance would have been a defining moment in their early relationship, based on what we know about when they first met. And so is Jess.
They all matter to the larger story, and they’re all going to play a part in it.
It helps a little bit to think of it in terms of what the 2016 Blair Witch film tried to accomplish; there’s actually a not-insignificant number of similarities between the Paranormal Paranoids/Shelby Oaks pairing and the 1999 Blair Witch Project/2016 Blair Witch pairing. For me, though, Blair Witch didn’t wholly succeed — and honestly, I think it’s because it lacked some of the elements that are baked right into Shelby Oaks by virtue of Paranormal Paranoids.
I bring this up somewhat tangentially, but largely because 1999’s The Blair Witch Project is, I think, ground zero for the found footage horror web series as a whole (more on that here). But stay with me, now:
If you squint a little bit, you can view the OG Blair Witch Project as analogous to the Paranormal Paranoids footage Jess has recovered, and the protagonist of the 2016 Blair Witch, James — who is presented as Heather Donahue’s sibling, now an adult and still consumed with solving the mystery of his sister’s disappearance nearly 20 years later — as a combination of Jess and Mia. The trouble is, The Blair Witch Project was originally envisioned as a standalone piece — which necessarily means that James, who we have never heard any mention of until Blair Witch, has been shoehorned into an existing mythology, rather than being a part of it from the get-go.
Yes, Blair Witch does sort of solve what happened to Heather, Josh, and Mike in The Blair Witch Project, and it does tell us exactly what happens to James as his search for Heather wraps up — both of which are things I suspect Shelby Oaks will do, too. But truthfully, James is a problem, and my lack of investment in him made the film largely fall flat for me. Part of it is that James himself is a wholly forgettable character — but another, perhaps more essential part of it was that I had no connection to him going into it.
But with Shelby Oaks? We have an existing relationship with Jess. We know about Mia, and we know about her and Riley’s relationship. We even know about Robert. These characters — known to be our protagonists for Shelby Oaks — are all built directly into the wider story at play here, and that’s entirely because of Paranormal Paranoids. Unlike James, these characters and their backgrounds aren’t just going to be shoehorned into Shelby Oaks; they’re already part of it.
But what if you haven’t seen Paranormal Paranoids? Will Shelby Oaks be watchable even if you don’t have that prior knowledge? I suspect that it will; the feature will be able to reach a wider audience if that’s the case, which, for a wide variety of reasons, makes sense to do. But even for those who come to the film fresh, the existence of the web series is still going to be crucial for our connection with Mia, Robert, and Jess. Because of what the web series accomplishes, the characters will already feel lived-in. They will already have established history with the mystery at the heart of the film — history we’ll be able to see and feel, rather than just being told exists. There will be heft and muscle behind their connection to the mystery, and to the missing people — exactly what James of Blair Witch lacked.
And I think that’s going to make all the difference.
The Haunting Continues
Up until now, there hasn’t been a web series-to-feature film project that has done precisely this. In The Dark is kind of considered a feature all its own these days. A Marble Hornets film does exist, but it’s the worst kind of adaptation — one that doesn’t really understand what makes its source material work, and mostly just uses the IP as set dressing, making it a sort of skin that sits on top of an otherwise fairly generic story. The terrifying short film “Lights Out” was expanded into a full-length feature in 2016, and although it has some strong set pieces within it, it doesn’t hold together terribly well as a whole. There’s Sickhouse, which was shot on and originally released entirely through Snapchat in 2016; and although Sickhouse is pretty effective, its format is functionally the same as more traditional found footage web series: Like all of its predecessors, it was released episodically, with all the episodes forming a full film when taken together. The only difference is the platform — that is, it used Snapchat instead of YouTube.
If Paranormal Paranoids and Shelby Oaks are doing what I think they’re doing, though, they’re accomplishing something truly unique — something that pushes the boundaries within a subgenre that hasn’t seen much innovation lately. And that’s incredibly exciting to me.
Could the last… 5,800 or so words I’ve just written become moot when Shelby Oaks actually comes out? Of course; right now, we can only put things together based on what we’ve seen in the web series, and the little drips and drabs and clues we’ve gotten about the production of Shelby Oaks. The film itself — its contents, and its form — could change everything.
But, you know what? Even if that turns out to be the case… it’ll still have been worth it.
The full Paranormal Paranoids series can be viewed at the @jesstheparanoid6180 YouTube channel; Shelby Oaks, meanwhile, will hopefully see its release this fall. You can also view the abbreviated behind-the-scenes videos about the making of the feature at Chris Stuckmann’s YouTube channel.
And in the meantime:
Stay away from Shelby Oaks.
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Follow The Ghost In My Machine on Twitter @GhostMachine13 and on Facebook @TheGhostInMyMachine. And for more games, don’t forget to check out Dangerous Games To Play In The Dark, available now from Chronicle Books!
[Photos via jesstheparanoid1680/YouTube (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; LouisePaxton/YouTube; Shelby Oaks]
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