{"id":224186,"date":"2025-10-25T06:36:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-25T06:36:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/224186\/"},"modified":"2025-10-25T06:36:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-25T06:36:08","slug":"shelby-oaks-director-chris-stuckmann-on-its-ending-youtube-origins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/224186\/","title":{"rendered":"Shelby Oaks Director Chris Stuckmann on Its Ending, YouTube Origins"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tSPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for the ending of \u201cShelby Oaks<\/a>,\u201d now playing in theaters.<\/p>\n

\n\tSo, who took Riley Brennan?<\/p>\n

\n\tDirector Chris Stuckmann<\/a> makes his directorial debut with Neon\u2019s horror \u201cShelby Oaks,\u201d which follows the disappearance of a YouTuber and amateur ghost hunter Riley Brennan (Sarah Durn). Having started his career as a film critic and essayist on YouTube, Stuckmann makes the transition to director with a horror movie that expertly blends media and feels at times like a mockumentary ripped right from the video platform.<\/p>\n

\n\tCamille Sullivan stars as Mia Brennan, who has been searching for her younger sister Riley after she vanished 12 years ago in the remote town of Shelby Oaks with her YouTube group, the Paranormal Paranoids. The film starts out like a fictional documentary on Riley\u2019s disappearance, but then transforms into a supernatural horror that uses found footage and scripted scares unlike any recent studio movie. It\u2019s like \u201cBlair Witch Project\u201d for the YouTube generation, and Stuckmann uses his years of experience on the platform to maximum effect.<\/p>\n

\n\tWith Variety, the director discusses his YouTube origins, shooting on old-school camcorders and that shocking ending.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy Everett Collection<\/p>\n

\t\tWhy was \u201cShelby Oaks\u201d the story you wanted to tell with your directorial debut?\t<\/p>\n

\n\tI didn\u2019t want to give any producers that I met a chance to turn me down, so I wrote probably like six or seven spec scripts and I went to film festivals and met so many different filmmakers and spent a lot of time trying to meet people and network and get to a place where I could make a connection with someone. It finally helped me get a movie off the ground, because I had been trying for so long. I didn\u2019t want to go into these situations with one script and pitch. So I went into a lot of these film festivals hoping to meet producers with a lot of scripts and pitches. When I bumped into Aaron Koontz at Fantastic Fest in 2019, I had two or three different things I could have pitched him at the time, and \u201cShelby Oaks\u201d was the one that caught his attention. From there, it became a process of developing it.<\/p>\n

\t\tI\u2019m from the Midwest, but I\u2019d never heard of Darke County in Ohio before. How did you choose that as your setting?\t<\/p>\n

\n\tI was trying to think of a general area in Ohio to set it in. Obviously Shelby Oaks is fictional, but as soon as I discovered the name \u201cDarke\u201d and it has an E, which makes it feel more artsy and it\u2019s farm country, it\u2019s literally exactly what I want. I\u2019ve taken a bit of a \u201cCastle Rock\u201d approach because a lot of my spec scripts take place in Darke County, this little mini cinematic universe that may or may not happen one day.<\/p>\n

\t\tHow did you blend the mix of mockumentary footage, YouTube found footage and scripted horror?\t<\/p>\n

\n\tBeing on YouTube since 2009, there is a phenomena that I have witnessed over the years: People like to watch people watch things. Reacting videos are a very, very popular trend. There is something very inviting about the idea of seeing a person take in information. There\u2019s this sequence with Mia where she watches the tape, and you\u2019re kind of there with her feeling her emotions. She\u2019s your conduit for these emotions. I really love the idea of mixing media, because I feel like that\u2019s how we all live now. We all pop on TikTok, YouTube, TV, movies, audio books, physical books, there\u2019s no set thing for all of us. We all experience media in different ways.<\/p>\n

\t\tWas there ever a version of this that was a full mockumentary version?\t<\/p>\n

\n\tIt started out completely mockumentary. The very first pitch that we ever had was that, out of necessity. My first idea for this movie was that I would self-finance it for like $20,000 and put it on YouTube, because I was tired of waiting. Eventually the ideas kept evolving and kept coming. As I was writing, I couldn\u2019t stop it. It was this whole thing, and now I had to figure out where this goes. The way it came to me was that every time you watch a mockumentary that\u2019s fictional, you know it\u2019s fictional. You\u2019re in on the joke. I understand that most of them are made out of a budgetary necessity, but since we\u2019re all in on the joke, why can\u2019t we have some fun with this? We have cameras that the actors are aware of, why can\u2019t we also have cameras they\u2019re not aware of and just play in that world?<\/p>\n

\t\tSome of the found-footage jump scares feel like throwbacks to the early days of scary YouTube videos, like the \u201cRelaxing Car Drive\u201d video<\/a> that I\u2019m sure many people have stumbled upon. How did you make these retro, proto-internet scares?\t<\/p>\n

\n\tI do think it does have something to do with YouTube, the internet and the creepypasta generation. We all look for ways to describe how art makes us feel through past pieces of art. We always try to find a way to connect. But we\u2019re in this generational shift now where filmmakers are starting to come out of the early YouTube years. Not all the inspiration is coming from film or TV anymore. A lot of it is coming from the internet. Like you mentioned that relaxing car video, I remember watching that back in the day and the thing pops up at the end and I\u2019m falling back in my seat. We weren\u2019t used to being scared by the internet yet. The internet was still kind of a remotely safe place. There wasn\u2019t social media yet. When things on the internet started to scare us, it\u2019s a whole new world of potential horror that can be mined. The mixed media element was very important to me to present different types of scares. The found-footage scare is very different from the traditional narrative scare, not just in visual presentation, but in sound. In the traditional narrative portion of the film, we really opened up the sound channels and explored so many more possibilities of what we could do with sound. In the the earlier portions of the movie, we tried to restrict ourselves a little bit more to the types of sounds that would come from an old-school camcorder. In those Paranormal Paranoids episodes, I shot all those myself with gear from pre-2008. The camcorder was from 2006. The microphone we used was from 2007. We didn\u2019t allow ourselves to have things they wouldn\u2019t have had.<\/p>\n

\t\tDid you always imagine the ending as a bleak punch to the gut? How much of it did you want to leave open to interpretation for fans?\t<\/p>\n

\n\tYes, there was never any question for me. All of my favorite horror films tend to have an ending that sticks with you. Obviously, when you\u2019re trying to get your script seen, there are going to be people who make requests, especially some of the less risk-taking producers. I was always very adamant that this has got to be the way it is. When I think about all my favorite horrors, they\u2019re very rarely warm and fuzzy at the end.<\/p>\n

\n\tIf you want to look at just the emotion of it, when something happens to you when you\u2019re younger that leaves a scar or some kind of trauma that it sticks with you, you could view that literally as a crack in a window. If you don\u2019t fix it or get and try to better your life, you just let it sit there and fester and grow and spider-web into something worse, eventually it will probably eat you alive. That\u2019s been the emotional idea behind this thing that has always been looming in the background of Riley and Mia\u2019s life that is also literally represented by this window in the conclusion of the movie. It\u2019s all in there, and there\u2019s a lot of hidden stuff too in various shots.<\/p>\n

\t\tThere are so many filmmakers, like Danny and Michael Philippou and Curry Barker, who are getting Hollywood deals after starting out on YouTube. How does it feel to see them grow after starting out online? \t<\/p>\n

\n\tI think it\u2019s absolutely wonderful. I\u2019ve talked with Danny and Mike, and I had Danny and Curry on my podcast. When I started my YouTube channel in 2009, it took about six years before I even was able to get press tickets to movies at advanced screenings. That\u2019s because at that time, YouTube as a platform was not taken seriously by Hollywood. If you said you were a YouTube film critic, they\u2019d be like, \u2018Cool. Have a nice day.\u2019 Now, when you go to a premiere, what do you see everywhere? YouTubers and TikTokers. Hollywood has had to take the platforms seriously. I think it\u2019s the same with film. There is a new generation of people in their 30s or late 20s who are coming up and started on Vine, TikTok and YouTube. Now they\u2019re getting a chance to make movies, because that is the progression of time that we\u2019re in. If YouTube existed in the \u201970s or \u201980s, I guarantee Scorsese, Spielberg, Robert Rodriguez, all those guys, would have been uploading.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for the ending of \u201cShelby Oaks,\u201d now playing in theaters. So, who…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":224187,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[56223,96,2839,21479,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-224186","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-chris-stuckmann","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-movies","11":"tag-shelby-oaks","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224186\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/224187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}