Chris Stuckmann on the set of Shelby Oaks.
Neon/Paper Street Pictures
Chris Stuckmann could have rested on his laurels. He could have coasted on his 2 million-plus YouTube subscribers and led a happy, fulfilling life as the internet’s premier movie buff. But teenage dreams don’t go away that easily, and as grateful as he is for the film community that’s formed around his eponymously named YouTube channel, his original ambition was to make movies, not talk about them. The Ohio native has been helming amateur shorts and features with his friends since he was 14 years old, and he continued doing so once he started YouTubing at 21. Each project got better and better, and in 2019, Stuckmann decided to truly make a go at professional filmmaking.
The first domino fell at 2019’s Fantastic Fest, where Stuckmann met Paper Street Pictures’ Aaron B. Koontz. The filmmaker pitched the indie producer on the fly during one of the fest’s signature boxing matches, and it happened to be his first time ever pitching what would become Shelby Oaks.
“Out of the blue, [Koontz] just was like, ‘So are you working on anything?’” Stuckmann tells The Hollywood Reporter. “So, in a very unprofessional way, I just blabber-mouthed a pitch for Shelby Oaks. I then saw that he had turned away from the boxing match and was locked in all of a sudden.”
The duo kept the conversation going into 2020, even once COVID upended any and all plans to that point. Then, in May of 2021, a YouTube channel called JesstheParanoid began to upload a series of found-footage videos from a forgotten YouTube show called Paranormal Paranoids, circa 2005-08. The ghost-hunting program’s four hosts, including the principal figure of Riley Brennan, purportedly disappeared without a trace. Less than two months after these videos resurfaced, Stuckmann and Koontz announced their intention to make a feature film that chronicles Mia Brennan-Walker’s (Camille Sullivan) efforts to find her missing sister, Riley. (To preserve the illusion, I’ll let you do the math on what’s what here.)
There was a plan in place to shoot Shelby toward the end of 2021, but Stuckmann pumped the brakes due to a potential IATSE strike at the time, as well as the realization that the movie’s existing budget wasn’t enough to achieve his vision. As the most prominent movie critic on YouTube, Stuckmann knew full well that he’d be held to a different standard than most first-time filmmakers, so he asked his loyal subscribers to graciously help finance Shelby Oaks. His fans responded by raising nearly $1.4 million, a new record for Kickstarter-funded horror films.
In May 2022, Stuckmann went off and shot his film in his home state of Ohio, and he entered into postproduction in early June. Once he had a rough cut, he reached out to horror maestro Mike Flanagan for feedback, and that’s when the Doctor Sleep and The Haunting of Hill House filmmaker offered to return the favor that Stuckmman had done for his career-changing second feature, Oculus (2013). Stuckmann had championed the film on his YouTube channel at the time, leading Flanagan to reach out and begin a years-long correspondence. The pair eventually shared scripts and swapped notes with one another. So, in May 2024, the news that Flanagan had added the weight of his name to Shelby became public knowledge, as did the involvement of his producing partners at Intrepid Pictures, Trevor Macy and Melinda Nishioka.
“[Flangan] was probably one of five people who saw the very first rough cut,” Stuckmann says. “That was when he said, ‘How can I help? What can I do? Can I be involved in any way?’ And, of course, I fell to my knees and was like, ‘I’ll do whatever you want. Yes, please.’”
Flanagan spent two days in the editing room with Stuckmann, helping him fine tune his transitions and middle act. He also brought in his composers James Burkholder and the Newton Brothers. (Stuckmann’s longtime composer, Aaron J. Morton, makes some particularly memorable contributions as well.) Once refined, Neon took a look at the film, and Stuckmann received yet another piece of good fortune, as the home of Parasite, I, Tonya and Anatomy of a Fall was interested in distributing Shelby Oaks worldwide. The official news dropped just 24 hours after Neon set its latest opening weekend record by way of Oz Perkins’ Longlegs.
“If someone had come to me on set and asked me what my number one home would be for this movie, I would’ve said Neon,” Stuckmann admits. “But I also would’ve immediately said that it’ll never happen. So the fact that it actually did, I still don’t believe it. I even spoke to a rep at Neon this morning, and I was like, ‘Yep, this is the phone call. It’s all going to go away.’ But here we are.”
If making his first feature film and simultaneously running his mega-successful YouTube channel weren’t enough, Stuckmann and his wife, Samantha Elizabeth, were trying to start a family in their already life-changing year of 2021. That November, they went public with the news that they’d given birth to twin boys, Fox and Grayson, who cameo in Shelby Oaks. They also detailed the challenging process they went through to start their family, and Elizabeth, who has a story credit on the film, helped Stuckmann loosely apply a version of their fertility story to Shelby Oaks’ central couple of Mia and Robert (Brendan Sexton III).
“As far as starting a family, it was always a goal for my wife and I, and because of various medical issues, it took a really long time to be able to finally have kids,” Stuckmann shares. “So I liked the idea of having Mia and Robert, the couple in the film, at odds with each other … My wife and I are very happy, but I was able to have her input of, ‘This is how I would feel if I were them or if I were her.’ So it was a great thing to be able to bounce off of her in that way.”
Below, during a recent conversation with THR, Stuckmann also discusses the particulars of creating Shelby Oaks‘ faux documentary. He then explains why his decision to only review films he appreciates has been one of the best moves he’s ever made.
At 14, you began to think about a filmmaking career, and you started to make no-budget shorts and features with friends. That continued at age 21 and beyond when you established a YouTube following for your movie reviews. Fast forward a decade, you then met producer Aaron B. Koontz at 2019’s Fantastic Fest. How did the initial deal for Shelby Oaks come together from there?
It’s a very entertaining story because I was unaware that Fantastic Fest does this thing called Fantastic Feuds where people literally box each other in a boxing ring. Even filmmakers do it; I saw a husband-and-wife filmmaking team do it, which was insane. So I was standing there amongst this crowd of very inebriated people watching Gigi Saul Guerrero, who’s a friend now, box another filmmaker, and I happened to be standing next to Aaron B. Koontz, who I now know from Paper Street Pictures. He was wearing an industry badge, and I just thought, “Well, I’m here to meet people like him. I’ll start a conversation.” We then talked for probably 30 minutes about the movies that we had seen at the festival. That was the year that Parasite, The Lighthouse and all these great movies were there.
Then, out of the blue, he just was like, “So are you working on anything?” And I thought, “Oh, that’s an open door kind of question, so let me try to slide in there.” I had never really pitched it before, so, in a very unprofessional way, I just blabber-mouthed a pitch for Shelby Oaks. I then saw that he had turned away from the boxing match and was locked in all of a sudden. He was like, “I really think that’s cool.” COVID then happened six months after, and while we worked through it, it was pretty terrifying at first. I was pretty sure that this chance just went away, but we kept pushing through it to where we are today.
You were already underway when the Philippou brothers went from their gonzo YouTube channel to Talk to Me, but there have been numerous critics turned filmmakers: Paul Schrader, Koganada, C. Robert Cargill. Was there one former critic that you looked to as an example more than others?
Cargill was a big one. He got his start with Ain’t It Cool News and Spill, and I asked him for quite a bit of advice in those stages. So he was very, very instrumental in just reassuring me that my dream is my dream. I’ve always wanted to make movies — way before I decided it might be fun to talk about them online. So filmmaking was always the path that was at the forefront of my brain. I was like, “That’s the train I’m on and I hope that I can get to the destination.” So he gave me a lot of great advice about the fact that, even if this is what I’ve always wanted to do, that’s not necessarily going to be the perception. His advice was to try to be at peace with that and accept that and not think too much about those added pressures that come with it and just make the best movie you can.
In 2021, you were writing the film with a production schedule in mind, but then you went the Kickstarter route due to the potential IATSE strike at the time. You also wanted to achieve the ambition that was in your head without settling. You then set a Kickstarter record for horror movies with nearly $1.4 million raised. Did you rewrite the movie to account for that bigger budget? Or did you just supercharge what you already had?
My absolutely brilliant DP, Andrew Scott Baird, and I talked for about a year before we shot the movie. We shot-listed and storyboarded and got on a really granular level of what everything needed to be. So I learned about how much gear, such as a technocrane, costs to rent and other things along those lines that I had no concept of, previously. And way before the Kickstarter happened, we realized that there was just no way that we were going to be able to afford the movie that we both wanted to shoot. So the script was always what it was, but for a long time, we were like, “I don’t know if we can do this. I don’t know if we’ll have the time.”
At that time, before Kickstarter, we had raised a small amount of money from independent financiers, and we were looking at a 15- to 16-day shoot, which would’ve been grueling and very, very difficult. So Kickstarter allowed us to add a lot of shooting days and get a better crew and have more time to prep and rent gear and hire animal wranglers and things along those lines. So, at the end of the day, the most important thing on any film shoot is time, and being able to have more of it was an absolute joy.
You knew a lot about filmmaking going into production; you likely received plenty of advice as well. But there is no substitute for experience, so what was the biggest eye-opener about the process?
Having shot so many amateur movies as a kid with friends and family and wearing rubber creature suits and all kinds of silly things, there was this amazing moment when I realized that I was genuinely surrounded by professionals who wanted to be there and who were great at their jobs. I didn’t have to explain everything the way that I did with my friends. There was this really funny moment on day two where I was chatting with an actor about the intention of something, and after a few takes, we weren’t quite getting it. So I gave this grand, unnecessary soliloquy, and they were like, “So you mean a little faster?” And I was like, “Yeah, faster. You’re right. Nevermind. You’re a professional. You know what you’re doing.” I was so used to having to wrangle everyone that I knew to do a thing and pay them with Taco Bell, and so it was a great experience to be able to work with professionals who actually wanted to be there.
One of the shots that struck me the most is an image of a baby crib that’s now being used for storage. It tells an entire story about the state of the film’s central couple, and I couldn’t help but think of you and your wife’s journey in creating a family. Was that experience happening at the same time as the writing of Shelby Oaks?
So my wife [Samantha Elizabeth] and I are very happy, but the couple in this movie are not. My wife has a story credit on the movie, and she and I would basically go over all of the dialogue and say it out loud. We’d put on these little plays for our friends and ask, “Hey, does this sound natural? Can you tell us if this feels like something someone would say?” So we’d act out those scenes together, and having her as that person to bounce off of in those early stages was invaluable.
But as far as starting a family, it was always a goal for my wife and I, and because of various medical issues, it took a really long time to be able to finally have kids. So I liked the idea of having Mia and Robert, the couple in the film, at odds with each other, but neither of them are really wrong. They’re both right in their own way, but it’s still like two freight trains that are opposing each other. So I thought that was a really interesting way to approach an onscreen marriage that maybe isn’t working out so great from the opening. Usually, it’s, “This is the bad guy, and this is the good guy. This person is right, this person’s wrong.” But both of these characters are just in a place where it’s not quite working. Again, my wife and I are very happy, but I was able to have her input of, “This is how I would feel if I were them or if I were her.” So it was a great thing to be able to bounce off of her in that way.
Riley Brennan (Sarah Durn) in Shelby Oaks.
Neon/Paper Street Pictures
The film is presented as a faux documentary of sorts, as the main character of Mia Brennan-Walker reflects on the disappearance of her ghost-hunting sister, Riley Brennan, in 2008. Thus, a lot of the doc elements have the aesthetic of 2008 internet, such as MySpace. Did you have to seek out permission from each platform or its remnants? Or did you design them to look similar but not exact?
I love this question, and the legalities were a big talking point early on. So, what we learned is that, for most companies, as long as you are showing their product as it is to be used in real life, they usually don’t care. If you’ve got an Apple computer in a movie and someone is just using it in a library, cool. But if they’re looking up how to be a criminal on an Apple computer, then Apple might have a problem. When it came to YouTube, I actually was able to reach out to them directly and get permission, so that was easy. For some of the older interfaces, we had a lot of people check and make sure that there were no issues with it.
But this was one of the things I was most excited about because that era of the internet was so innocent, and as a creator at that time, there were not a lot of people watching YouTube in 2008. It was only 3 years old. So you could make amateur content, and people would notice because there weren’t as many people making stuff. The first YouTube video is a guy at a zoo, and it has millions of hits. This was obviously pre-AI and before anyone with visual effects experience started making videos. So if you were a ghost-hunting channel and you were capturing things that were intriguing at that time, it’s harder to discredit because there weren’t as many people out there doing that. So this was just a fun way to enter into that time.
As of June 2022, you were in postproduction, and at a certain point, Intrepid Pictures joined the fold. What happened?
I met Mike Flanagan about 10 years ago through email. I reviewed Oculus, his first big independent film, and nobody knew who he was at the time. He had a hard time finding distribution for it, but it was a big success for him. It was shot for $5 million and made $44 million. But when I reviewed it, I was like, “You guys have got to go see this movie. It’s so cool, and this guy is going places.” So he reached out to me immediately and thanked me, and we just started a correspondence for years that began as just nerdy film shit. When his movie Before I Wake did not have U.S. distribution, he emailed me and was like, “There’s a Blu-ray in Canada and Canada’s Region 1, so you should get it.” And I was like, “Oh, cool. He knows how much I like physical media.” So for probably three or four years, we would talk about stuff like that and the movies we liked.
And, finally, similar to Koontz at Fantastic Fest, he just asked me, “So are you working on anything?” And I said, “Well, I’ve got this script that I’ve been toying with.” It was the first feature script I had ever written, and he read it and thought it was really good. So he gave me some notes, and then that evolved the relationship into one where we would share ideas. I would read some of his stuff, and he would read some of my stuff. It became this friendship that went from talking about Blu-rays to actually giving notes on each other’s work.
So when he saw the success of the Shelby Oaks Kickstarter, he reached out and asked if he could read it. So he read it, loved it and had no notes. He was like, “Go shoot your movie. I can’t wait to see it.” So there was nothing official at that time, and I went off and shot the movie. And then he was probably one of five people who saw the very first rough cut. That was when he said, “How can I help? What can I do? Can I be involved in any way?” And, of course, I fell to my knees and was like, “I’ll do whatever you want. Yes, please.” So it was pretty cool.
Flanagan spent two days in the editing room with you. It looks like he brought in his composers as well. Every young filmmaker figures this out at some point, but did he help you learn the lesson of how to kill a few darlings in the edit?
Yeah, he helped quite a bit with getting in and out of scenes faster. Sometimes, when you’re writing, you never really know if someone will get every intention, and you want to make things clear. So Mike was there to say, “It’s clear enough, and it’s OK if not everything is perceived instantaneously on the first viewing, like a conveyor belt into our mind. That’s why you have rewatches.” So there were many scenes that began sooner or ended later, and he would suggest cutting five seconds here or five seconds there. That eventually amounted to a few minutes.
There was one fairly significant cut that was made in the middle of the film that involved a few more scenes with Mia and Robert, and it’s one of those things where you want to write enough and shoot enough so that the character choices make sense. But then you’re watching the whole thing for the 500th time and you realize, “I can take some of this out.” So Mike was absolutely instrumental because he’s been an editor for so long. He started out editing car commercials way before he ever got a film off the ground, so he provided truly invaluable help.
Besides Flanagan, you received help from some other filmmakers: Beck and Woods, David F. Sandberg, Sev Ohanian. Did they give you notes on drafts or cuts?
Those filmmakers all gave notes on the rough cut. I basically reached out to them for notes. They’re all people I respect, and they’re all from very different film backgrounds and make very different kinds of movies. Sev produced Judas and the Black Messiah, Creed III, Missing, Searching, and of course, David Sandberg made Lights Out, Annabelle: Creation and Shazam! I also spoke with Travis Stevens, who did A Wounded Fawn. So I just wanted to spread a wide net and ask, “How is this working for all of you?” And that first initial session on the rough cut was probably the most valuable note session I had, because it was the very first time anybody who wasn’t involved with the production had seen the movie. So you’re getting those very fresh eyes: “Oh, I got this. You don’t have to explain that. This wasn’t quite clear enough, so maybe you want to look at it a little more.” So all of them gave really great feedback.
Well, a day after Neon set their new opening weekend record with Longlegs, it was announced that they were acquiring Shelby Oaks’ worldwide rights. You really couldn’t have scripted better timing. How did this deal go down?
I genuinely can’t believe it’s real. I was in a state of denial for a few weeks. Every time I would get a text from our producers, I would be like, “Oh, that’s it! It’s not going to happen. It’s all gone to shit.” But it just kept moving forward. Basically, Neon was able to see the movie, and we heard they liked it. And I was like, “OK, that’s really cool, but nothing will happen.” My friends tease me about it, but I never think anything will work out. I am very much like Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm.
But the conversations with Neon have been so encouraging. They love movies, they love filmmakers and they’re incredibly supportive of unique visions. They’re one of the very few places where everyone I spoke to who had worked with them had nothing but good things to say, and that’s rare. That’s really rare. Most filmmakers have had some very negative experiences with companies that buy their movies, especially at the indie level.
If someone had come to me on set and asked me what my number one home would be for this movie, I would’ve said Neon. But I also would’ve immediately said that it’ll never happen. So the fact that it actually did, I still don’t believe it. I even spoke to a rep at Neon this morning, and I was like, “Yep, this is the phone call. It’s all going to go away.” But here we are.
By the time people read this, Shelby Oaks will have premiered at Fantasia in Montreal. What made that festival the right place for the world premiere?
Oh my God, Fantasia is the most welcoming crowd. They love genre movies. They’re ravenous for genre movies. They play really strange and unique movies — everything from anime to action, sci-fi and horror movies from every country. So it just feels like home for someone like me, and [Fantasia’s artistic director] Mitch Davis and everyone here has been so welcoming and supportive.
As for your YouTube channel, you stopped reviewing films that you don’t connect with, and it reminds me of a story John Krasinski once told. Around the start of his filmmaking career in 2009, he was hanging out with Paul Thomas Anderson, as one does, and he criticized a movie, prompting PTA to insist that he, as a newly established filmmaker, no longer cast aspersions on other films. He urged Krasinski to respect the swing so that filmmakers in general can keep getting more at-bats. So if PTA of all people doesn’t badmouth movies, then I think you made the right call as a first-time filmmaker.
(Laughs.) I appreciate that. Even beyond what is acceptable conduct for a filmmaker, I just feel so much happier. It’s so easy to drown in negativity, and it’s really easy for us to forget why we love movies in the first place and what they meant to us as kids. When I would go to movies as a kid, I didn’t run home and check every social media outlet to see what other people thought. I just had my friends or my mom, and it was such an innocent time of genuine inspiration and loving something and not worrying if other people loved it or didn’t like it. There’s something so pure about that, and it is really difficult to capture that now because we’re so into the binary of, “It’s good or bad. I liked it or I didn’t like it. It has this score or this grade.”
It doesn’t mean that we’re not going to go to movies and be like, “Oh, that didn’t work for me.” Of course, that happens, but there is something very eye-opening about meeting so many filmmakers and seeing the struggle of getting a film off the ground. It goes so far beyond making the movie, and it goes into trying to find a distributor and trying to sell the movie and endless meetings about things like, “Is this right for your company?” It’s such a struggle to get a film out there, and I used to hear people always say that any film is a miracle, but I truly believe it now. It’s so difficult to get something to the point where it’s done and then other people get to watch it at home or in a theater. It’s really an amazing thing, and so I have nothing but respect for filmmakers who go through that journey.
From the Kickstarter campaign and Mike Flanagan to Gersh and now Neon, Shelby Oaks has had a charmed existence, but there must have been some lowlights. What was the ultimate back-against-the-wall moment?
We had quite a few delays, and while they have resulted in, as you said earlier, really amazing timing, they were quite depressing at the time. I still live in Ohio, I’ve wanted to make movies my whole life, and I kept feeling like I was almost there. But having pitched it before COVIS and then COVID happening, I thought, “This thing is dead in the water now.” But we started using Zoom more and having script meetings over Zoom, so I realized it wasn’t dead. Of course, there were strikes last year that halted our postproduction. We hadn’t finished our ADR yet, and we needed the actors to still do ADR. There was an almost IATSE strike, and I’m not talking about the current one. So we faced a lot of delays, and every time a delay would happen, I would think, “Well, the plug just got pulled out of the outlet. It’s not going to happen.”
So it was a very stressful time because I was also learning how to be a dad. I became a father to twin boys who are now 3, but at the time, I was only a couple months into their life. So I was not only figuring out what being a dad of twins is, but I was also trying to get Shelby Oaks off the ground. I now have gray in my beard that I did not have then. (Laughs.) So it’s been a very crazy few years, but it all worked out.
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Shelby Oaks arrives in theaters next year via Neon.