In March 2022, Chris Stuckmann – primarily known for his film-centric YouTube channel – launched a Kickstarter campaign for his horror movie, “Shelby Oaks,” which he co-wrote with his wife, Samantha Elizabeth.
He eventually raised almost $1.4 million – not a small amount of money, but not a large one for a feature film. They may have beat their fundraising goal, but the film still ran out of money before they were done shooting everything in the script. The crew carried on, and “Shelby Oaks” premiered at the genre-focused Fantasia International Film Festival in 2024.
When Neon eventually acquired the rights to the movie, they pitched in and paid for three extra days of filming, allowing Stuckmann to capture those missing scenes and ramp up the gore. The result is a solidly spooky debut about a paranormal investigator who goes missing and the sister who won’t stop searching for her.
Stuckmann was born into a devout Jehovah’s Witness family. The sibling relationship in “Shelby Oaks” partly comes from his experience being separated from his sister when she was excommunicated from his church. Ahead of the release of the film, Rough Draft Atlanta spoke with Stuckmann about the inspiration behind the film, the importance of community in indie filmmaking, and his relationship with filmmaker Mike Flanagan.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I’ve heard you talk a little bit about the impetus behind this film, and your connection to this idea of abandoned amusement parks, and the sibling relationship that sits at the core of this story. When did you decide that you actually wanted to make this into a film, and how did that all coalesce?
Chris Stuckmann: It’s a long journey between my wife and I making a YouTube special for our Halloween special, and doing a found footage sketch and deciding, “We’re tired of waiting. Let’s work on something.” [We combined] that with some of the things that traumatized me the most as a kid, which was this belief that my parents and the religion I was raised in instilled in me that demons were real, and that they were watching you and waiting for a moment to strike, and if you gave them that freedom, they would attack you. It’s a very strange way to be raised and to have that belief system.
That combined with, of course, being estranged from my sister for as long as I was when she was disfellowshipped from our religion, was, like you said, the impetus to find a way to take some of these more personal elements of my life and tell them in a movie that’s also a love letter to the horror genre.
I think the way you start this film is very interesting, with that mockumentary style. Why did you choose to start it that way and then throw us into the deep end with a regular horror movie?
Stuckmann: For me, every time that I would watch a mockumentary film, I knew that it was fiction. I was like, “Why can’t we play around with the fact that it is fiction? Why do we have to continue the ruse? Why can’t we acknowledge what the audience already knows and have cameras that are fictional cameras as well as non fictional cameras?” There are cameras in this movie the characters are aware of, and then at times we’re watching them and they don’t know they’re being watched. I like the idea of telling a story through all those different lenses.
Was that something that you had as an idea at the very beginning? How did the script evolve, and what were some of the biggest changes along the way?
Stuckmann: Yeah, that was before, officially, we got the green light to at least try to get the movie funded. I remember having a conversation with a filmmaker buddy of mine about it and asking him, “Is this like, a rule? It has to all be one thing?” They were like, “Dude, there are no rules. You can do whatever you want! Tell your story.” That was always there.
Going back to the things that scared you most as a child, watching this movie I was thinking a lot about the Creepypasta of it all, which I feel like is kind of a bygone era from my childhood. But it feels like a lot of the people who were raised on that sort of thing are making movies now, with things like “Skinamarink,” and the “The Backrooms” movie that’s coming next year. Why do you think that particular flavor of horror has such a staying power with people, and what makes it unique?
Stuckmann: I know what it was for me, and why that era of internet horror impacted me. I didn’t get the internet in my house until I was about 15, and so I had what you would call, I guess, a normal childhood. But even when I got the internet, it was still very much infant internet. You know – social media wasn’t around, it felt very safe. That idea of, “the internet is safe,” was challenged when I discovered that there were horror stories on the internet too. I remember the first time I saw the relaxing driving video on YouTube, where it was two minutes of a car and at the end, a zombie pops up. I remember thinking, “Oh my god. There’s this new piece of technology, this new platform for scary stories.”
It felt so inventive and fresh, because I had spent my childhood reading “Goosebumps” books, and “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark,” watching “The X-Files” – that was how I got my horror. And suddenly I discovered there was this whole other space that could scare me. I think that probably is why it does have staying power … that was kind of my first time feeling like, wait – you could see things online that might bother you, you know? I think that always kind of stayed with me.
Did you have any cinematic references when you were crafting “Shelby Oaks?” Were there any movies that you were thinking of?
Stuckmann: Absolutely, the two biggest ones were “Lake Mungo” and “Noroi,” both films I love and that scared me quite a bit. These very unfiltered, raw movies that felt personal too. And then I would say the original Japanese “Ring” [“Ringu”] is one that I thought about a lot, more so for the vibes of it – the sort of creepy, eerie, unsettling nature to that film that has never quite left me and always makes my hair stand on end. That was really the approach to the horror in this movie we wanted to take, because I love all horror, and I love a good jump scare. I love slasher movies and stuff. But the way that I always pitched this was, this is more of an eerie, atmospheric, unsettling, mystery horror. Can we make it feel creepy?
You had a Kickstarter to help get this funded, and I also read that you kept in contact with a contact from a previous video, who organized ghost tours at the Ohio State Reformatory, and were able to finagle a location that way. It got me thinking a lot about the importance of community in indie filmmaking. Could you touch a little bit on that and talk about the community aspect of getting this done on such a low budget?
Stuckmann: Oh, man, absolutely. That is the only way that you can make an indie film anymore, is relying on a group of people who are as passionate as you are, and also pulling every card you’ve ever had with anybody – every relationship, every friendship, every brief interaction, every acquaintance you’ve ever had that could maybe help you get this film off the ground. I remember, with M. Night Shyamalan’s first movie “Praying With Anger,” that he made when he was at NYU, he talked about how he was going to every uncle, every aunt, everybody he ever knew: “Can I please have a little bit of money to get this thing done?” It is this level of persistence.
For me, I have a lot of social anxiety, and it’s very difficult for me sometimes with crowds and big moments of talking to a lot of people. I have to kind of build myself up to it. There is also this part of me that had to kind of give into that, and just forget about that. Look, you’re going to be a leader on this, and you’re going to have to talk to a lot of people. You’re going to have to go to these locations, and you’re going to have setbacks, and you’re going to have successes, and you’re going to have failures.
We had locations we went to where they were interested in the film, but as soon as they found out it was a horror movie, they were like, “No, we don’t want you to shoot.” There are a lot of people in Ohio who are like, horror equals the devil, and thus it is bad. We had a hospital location fall through because of that. So there were a lot of challenges.
Speaking of the Kickstarter of it all, you raised money that sounds like a lot to a layman, but a little over $1 million for a film is not that much. You mentioned challenges – what were some of the cuts and work arounds you had to employ?
Stuckmann: I would say we were halfway through the shoot where our first AD came to me and was like, “Is there anything left on the schedule that you don’t think we need?” It was a real, serious conversation of, we don’t have enough time, and we can’t afford overtime. I did have to pick a few moments in every scene for the rest of the shoot, that were kind of those wish list moments, that we just had to lose. Gratefully, when we were able to do three extra days because of Neon, I got those moments back.
I’ve read that you have a pretty close relationship with filmmaker Mike Flanagan. What have you gleaned from him over the course of that friendship, whether it be professional or personal advice?
Stuckmann: Beyond the fact that he’s just such a good person and a kind man, he’s a great filmmaker and truly, really, very skilled at his craft. He’s been around the block way more times than me. He’s made multiple films and television shows, and so I can ask him, pretty much every step of the way, how did you handle this part – whether it’s post production, whether it’s the first edit, a test screening, a friends and family screening, or, right now, release week. I can literally text him and be like, “How do you deal with this level of anxiety? [Laughs] Help me feel more calm.” He’s very, very good at being like, “Look – this is your first one. You’re gonna make more. Just be in the moment and enjoy it as best you can.” He’s very good at keeping me level headed.
