“Shelby Oaks,” a new horror movie that Neon is releasing this weekend, pairs traditional narrative elements with the grainy, found footage aesthetic of, say, “Paranormal Activity” or “The Blair Witch Project.” The movie follows a woman (Camille Sullivan) who is searching for her younger sister (Sarah Durn), a semi-famous YouTube personality known for investigating paranormal phenomena, who has mysteriously vanished.
It serves as a throwback to the found footage craze of the 2000s, but with a level of authenticity that feels wholly unique — like “Blair Witch” for the YouTube age. And if you watch “Shelby Oaks” and think that it could only have been made by someone with YouTube experience, you’d be right.
“Shelby Oaks” was written, produced and directed by Chris Stuckmann, a critic and video essayist who has amassed more than 2 million subscribers on YouTube, with videos that have garnered over 789 million views since he launched his channel in 2009.
He’s part of a growing number of creatives who spent the beginning of their careers making waves on YouTube before taking the leap to traditional filmmaking — Kogonada, who directed the Margot Robbie/Colin Farrell romantic fantasy “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” earlier this fall, got his start in video essays, and Michael Shanks, whose horror movie “Together” sold to Neon for $17 million out of the Sundance Film Festival, as well as brothers Danny and Michael Philippou, whose sophomore feature “Bring Her Back” arrived this summer from A24, all first came to prominence making videos on YouTube.
But as so many creators try and fail to break out of the YouTube/social media bubble, how did the 37-year-old Stuckmann secure the backing of a hip Hollywood distributor, creative input from a famous horror director and the financing to fine-tune his indie before it hit theaters?
The Road to ‘Shelby Oaks’
Stuckmann started working on ideas for “Shelby Oaks” in 2016 based on a YouTube sketch that he had completed.
“We were really tired of waiting for some powerful person in Hollywood to reach out and say, ‘You get to do it now.’ A lot of people are in that place where they don’t know who in a position of power is going to help me make the thing I want to make,” Stuckmann told TheWrap. He wondered – is it a manager? An agent? A producer? An executive at a studio? “That was, for me, the most difficult thing.”
He would watch – of course – videos of filmmakers who were giving advice to young filmmakers about how to make a movie. Stuckmann wondered about all that red tape – all the paperwork and formalities associated with making a movie, including interacting with certain guilds and getting proper approval. (At the Los Angeles premiere of the movie, Stuckmann said he would just knock on people’s doors and ask if he could film at their house. It worked.)
“It took a long time to figure that out. I just got tired of waiting,” Stuckmann said. The initial idea was to make something and put it on his YouTube channel. “We would just spend our own money from our own bank account and make a really cheap movie and just put it on YouTube and not worry about it. But the ideas just kept coming.”
He would work with his wife, staying up until the wee hours of the morning, brainstorming ideas about what this feature could be.
Soon, it ballooned into something more. “It got into a bigger story and a bigger movie over the course of about three years before we got the actual greenlight to make it,” Stuckmann said.
In 2019 at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas, one of the liveliest genre film festivals in the world, Stuckmann met producer Aaron Koontz. Together, they raised an initial round of funding – $150,000. But COVID-related delays pushed production. They realized there was a version of the movie that they could make for $150,000, but nobody wanted to. Stuckmann said he reluctantly began a Kickstarter campaign, again leaning on his YouTube background. “I had never really asked my audience for anything before,” he said, explaining his hesitation to go to his fans for help.
“The thing that made me want to do it was when I realized that the rewards that we could offer were more than just T-shirts and posters and things like that,” Stuckmann said. “As soon as we came across this idea of a behind-the-scenes documentarian following me while I was shooting the movie and then giving the backers weekly episodes of the production itself, that was like, Okay, I would have loved to have something like that when I was a teenager, when I was in my early 20s, when I was trying to get something off the ground. Just to watch someone actually doing it in real time – that, to me, was the thing that made me excited about offering the Kickstarter campaign, because I would have wanted that experience.”
The YouTuber-turned-filmmaker would turn the making of his movie into a YouTube series all its own.
He thought of the behind-the-scenes material as a “mini-film school.” He wanted to offer the backers “an experience that they could remember and maybe even learn from.” And fret not – even if you weren’t a backer, that material will be available on a fully tricked-out physical media version of the movie, coming soon from Neon.
The Flanagan Effect
Stuckmann would later get a creative boost from filmmaker Mike Flanagan, who made “The Haunting of Hill House,” “Doctor Sleep” and, most recently, “The Life of Chuck” (another Neon acquisition). Stuckmann had formed a friendship with Flanagan over the years; early on in Flanagan’s career, he had reviewed “Oculus.” But as Stuckmann started talking more and more about wanting to make a feature, Flanagan reached out and said, “Could I read something of yours?”
“That blew my mind – that he was willing to take the time to actually read some of my work and offer me advice and notes and support,” Stuckmann said.
Flanagan read “two or three” of his scripts and helped him find a manager. “I think there was probably a lot of doubt from some of the managers I met with because there weren’t too many YouTubers who had made movies at that time,” Stuckmann remembered.
Stuckmann eventually found a manager and then wrote “Shelby Oaks,” and when he sent Flanagan the script, Flanagan — who also contributed to the Kickstarter — encouraged Stuckmann to make it. The Kickstarter ultimately raised $1,390,845 from 14,720 backers — far more than the $250,000 goal they started with, and enough to get going.
When the movie was done and they didn’t have any money for an editor, Stuckmann cut a rough version together and sent it to Flanagan. His response? “He literally said, ‘How can I help? I want to be attached to this.’ And he immediately offered an EP credit and all this stuff. He said, ‘Let me actually be a voice for you.’ It was really inspiring to show him the worst version the movie would ever be and have him sit up and see the value in it and know what it could become and want to be a part of it,” Stuckmann said.
After screening a version of the movie at the 2024 edition of Fantastic Fest, Neon came on board. They offered to give Stuckmann some additional days of photography, including some more elaborate gore effects and more stuff with dogs. Neon read an early version of the script and asked where some of the things they loved went.
“I said, ‘Well, we ran out of money.’ And they said, ‘Well, what if you had more money and time?’ We went back for three days,” Stuckmann explained. The changes were minimal, but they mattered a lot to Stuckmann. He got to finally realize the movie that he’d had in his head for nearly a decade.
“Neon has been such an incredible place to be a filmmaker, because they’re filmmaker-first and really care that the people they’re working with are happy,” Stuckmann said of the company that last year won Best Picture with “Anora,” picked up multiple critically acclaimed films from Cannes earlier this year and has now forged multi-film partnerships with people like Steven Soderbergh and Osgood Perkins.
Advice for Future YouTubers-Turned-Filmmakers
We suggested to Stuckmann that “Shelby Oaks” feels like a movie that could only have been made by someone so well-versed in the particulars of YouTube, especially in the first 30 minutes or so, when it’s establishing the lore of the movie and its connection to the platform.
“I think the thing that always interests me the most about YouTube is its infancy,” Stuckmann said. When he started his channel 16 years ago, the platform had only been around for four years. “I remember the way YouTube felt at the time, and the sense of sort of endless discovery that was possible at that time. It felt very much like anybody could make anything and people would watch because it wasn’t so oversaturated.”
The cameras were more rudimentary but “it didn’t really matter if you appeared amateur in the way you made your videos,” he said. “There was this real raw authenticity to it.”
There would be videos of UFOs or creatures and it was before AI and computer-generated imagery could fake that stuff more readily. “There was this sense of like, Oh my God, is that real? Because not everybody had this knowledge of visual effects and editing now and there was this sense of quaint, naïveté about it too,” Stuckmann said.
All of this was fed into “Shelby Oaks.”
“I like this idea of these paranormal investigators who started at that time on the platform. And what would it be like if almost every video they make, they found something strange – how would people react to that?” Stuckmann said. “I thought a lot about those early years of YouTube while writing it.”
As for his advice for artists looking to follow a similar path?
Well, some of the advice that he hears time and time again is starting to “become a bit old hat,” to Stuckmann. Things like “you’ve got a camera in your pocket, go out and make something.”
“Yes, that is true, but also people know that already and a lot of young people are out there making stuff. They’re putting it on TikTok and YouTube and they’re just trying to get noticed,” Stuckmann said. “The thing that I did differently was when I started, I knew I wanted to make genre movies. I wanted to be in the horror or the action or the thriller space in some capacity.”
He realized that he needed to start attending genre film festivals, equating it to a moment in M. Night Shyamalan’s “Unbreakable” when Samuel L. Jackson tells Bruce Willis, “Go to where the people are.”
That’s what Stuckmann did and where his dream started to coalesce into reality. It couldn’t be fully realized by sitting at a desk in front of his computer.
“Go there and meet people who are wearing a badge that says filmmaker or industry. They’re identifying themselves by their badges right there. And that’s how I got this movie made,” Stuckmann said.
“But don’t walk in there with a sign that says, I’m an indie filmmaker, please make my thing, because they’ll just smile,” he added. “You just need to go there and make friends with people, and you will eventually find another writer or maybe a writing team. You’ll meet networks of people who are all part of the same group. And eventually you will bump into a producer or executive or someone looking for something right.”
And maybe you’ll go from being a commenter on YouTube to having your horror film open in thousands of screens across the country the weekend before Halloween.
