Shelby Oaks: Chris Stuckmann’s Journey from YouTube to NEON

When Shelby Oaks premiered earlier this month at Fantastic Fest, it felt something like a homecoming to Chris Stuckmann. The longtime YouTube movie critic and personality has been coming to the festival for years. And well before he committed to making the jump across the line that divides film reviewers from filmmakers, he always admired the ambience of a community that treated horror with the passion of an Oscar blogger in Venice.

“They treat it at a prestige level,” Stuckmann observes when visiting our studio on the ground in Austin. He also confirms it’s hallowed space for his directorial feature debut. After all, Shelby Oaks’ journey to the big screen began here.

“Initially we were just going to make this movie for not a lot of money and put it on my YouTube channel,” Stuckmann says, “that was the initial idea. But it just kept evolving from there, and the script kept getting bigger and bigger until I was able to pitch here at Fantastic Fest about six years ago.” Surrounded by peers and horror aficionados, the genre enthusiast who found his voice online now knew enough likeminded storytellers to make the leap to the big screen.

But then part of the appeal of Shelby Oaks is its intimate understanding of 21st century media and storytelling, whether that be in the movie house or on a social media platform. The film stars sisters Mia and Riley (Camille Sullivan and Sarah Durn). The former is our central character, an older adult sibling who still obsesses over the mysterious disappearance of Riley from back in the 2000s. Once a minor YouTube darling thanks to a DIY paranormal investigation series she filmed with friends in the platform’s early days, Riley vanished into the night after recording creepy, unedited footage near an abandoned amusement park outside of Shelby Oaks, Ohio.

However, in a bitter irony, Riley’s disappearance eventually evolved into its own internet mythology, feeding countless other YouTube videos and decades-later documentaries, including the one which begins Stuckmann’s film. At a glance, this documentary-within-a-movie is about Mia putting to rest Riley’s lingering mystery. That changes, though, once the cameras stop rolling and someone with valuable, missing DV tape shows up at Mia’s front door.

The impetus for the feature came out of Stuckmann’s own long-running YouTube channel dedicated to reviewing new releases, as well as vintage deep cuts often in the horror genre.

“I did a YouTube sketch with my wife in 2016, and we did this cabin in the woods thing where we went to a cabin in the woods and talked about cabin in the woods movies,” Stuckmann recalls with a slight smile. “Very original, I am a YouTuber. But we did this wrap-around sketch where this killer was trying to kill us, and we did it by ourselves and had so much fun doing it, and we were driving home from Tennessee—and it’s a six-hour drive—and we were asking, ‘Why aren’t we just making something? We are so tired of waiting.’”

Obviously from its premise about a YouTube personality going missing, the film touches on elements Stuckmann knows from his own life, right down to Riley disappearing at Shelby Oaks in 2008, which butts up against when Stuckmann launched his own channel in 2009.

Says the filmmaker, “I remember the quaint, charming days of early YouTube where there was just a few people who were talking about stuff on that platform. It felt super small and felt like this little community, so that was important to me.” Yet while the film started from a familiar place, one of the most striking things about Shelby Oaks is how it breaks free from preconceived notions of how a story about a missing filmmaker can play out. There are clear homages to found footage movies in Stuckmann’s debut, most notably The Blair Witch Project, yet after a mockumenatry-like first act, the film pivots hard into a traditional narrative structure with Mia turning off the camera.

“I remember the first time I was writing the treatment, it started as this sort of found footage, mocumentary/moc-doc approach,” Stuckmann explains, “and I thought to myself ‘what are the rules of this?’ And as soon as I started thinking in that way, I was upset with myself. Because I want to break some rules. You want to try and reinvent something and do something new, and I remember I called a filmmaking buddy of mine and asked, ‘Am I allowed to do this where it just changes?’ And he’s like, ‘Do whatever you want!’”

He continues, “Whenever I watch a moc-doc, which I love—Lake Mungo, Noroi are two of my favorite movies of all-time, my two biggest inspirations on this one—I always think to myself, ‘We are all in on the joke. We know this is fictional, so why can’t we play around with it?’”

The result is a movie which can include extended sequences of Riley’s paranormal YouTube series filming inside a decrepit, abandoned prison—shot at the real abandoned Ohio State Reformatory prison where the Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile were also filmed—and then sister Mia returning to the same site years later.

“We literally just walked around the prison, and they were like, ‘This is where we put the solitary confinement people, and this is where they put the people they couldn’t even get into solitary confinement,’” recalls Durn. “You’re literally walking on these grated platforms and you’re four stories up, and you’re like ‘this is not great.’”

Co-star Sullivan even remembers having her own quasi-supernatural experience shooting up on the prison’s platforms.

“While doing the reshoots, I was running to the end and there was nothing back there, so I ran as fast as I could and only did it a few times, and the last take I was doing, I heard ‘no, no, no, no,’” reveals Sullivan. “And I looked around and didn’t see anything, I was like, ‘Is someone there?’ And I hear ‘it’s just me.’ That’s not reassuring at all!”

It turned out to be a prank, but it added to an eerie ambience that comes from making a real-film on real locations. For Stuckmann, it all represents a kind of full-circle moment, including with how Shelby Oaks found its biggest champion in The Life of Chuck and Gerald’s Game director, Mike Flanagan. 

“I’ve known him since Oculus,” Stuckmann says. “When I reviewed Oculus he reached out to me, back when he was just ‘Mike.’ He wasn’t, you know, Haunting of Hill House and Doctor Sleep’s Mike Flanagan yet. So I reviewed his movie and it was so good… and we became friends after that and he gave me a lot of advice on scripts over the years. He would read my scripts and be a mentor for me, and when Shelby came around, his involvement got serious. He read the script and loved it.”

Afterward Stuckmann went out and shot the supernatural chiller, bringing back an assembly cut that ran over three hours when it was screened for Flanagan.

Says Stuckmann, “[It was] basically every scene in chronological order with no artistic intent whatsoever, so it’s a nightmare. It’s so embarrassing to show anyone that. But he loved it and wanted to be involved officially after that and became a real force in post making great suggestions about editing.” Flanagan would even give further advice on which producers to work with, which to avoid, and how best to bring the film to market.

Now on the other side, all these years later, Stuckmann is back at Fantastic Fest as a filmmaker instead of a critic, and with a picture about to be distributed by indie tastemaker studio NEON in time for spooky season. Who says horror movies can’t have happy endings?

Shelby Oaks releases only in theaters on Oct. 24.