Origins

SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for the ending of “Shelby Oaks,” now playing in theaters.

So, who took Riley Brennan?

Director Chris Stuckmann makes his directorial debut with Neon’s horror “Shelby Oaks,” 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.

Camille 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’s disappearance, but then transforms into a supernatural horror that uses found footage and scripted scares unlike any recent studio movie. It’s like “Blair Witch Project” for the YouTube generation, and Stuckmann uses his years of experience on the platform to maximum effect.

With Variety, the director discusses his YouTube origins, shooting on old-school camcorders and that shocking ending.

Why was “Shelby Oaks” the story you wanted to tell with your directorial debut?

I didn’t 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’t 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 “Shelby Oaks” was the one that caught his attention. From there, it became a process of developing it.

I’m from the Midwest, but I’d never heard of Darke County in Ohio before. How did you choose that as your setting?

I 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 “Darke” and it has an E, which makes it feel more artsy and it’s farm country, it’s literally exactly what I want. I’ve taken a bit of a “Castle Rock” 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.

How did you blend the mix of mockumentary footage, YouTube found footage and scripted horror?

Being 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’s this sequence with Mia where she watches the tape, and you’re kind of there with her feeling her emotions. She’s your conduit for these emotions. I really love the idea of mixing media, because I feel like that’s how we all live now. We all pop on TikTok, YouTube, TV, movies, audio books, physical books, there’s no set thing for all of us. We all experience media in different ways.

Was there ever a version of this that was a full mockumentary version?

It 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’t 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’s fictional, you know it’s fictional. You’re in on the joke. I understand that most of them are made out of a budgetary necessity, but since we’re all in on the joke, why can’t we have some fun with this? We have cameras that the actors are aware of, why can’t we also have cameras they’re not aware of and just play in that world?

Some of the found-footage jump scares feel like throwbacks to the early days of scary YouTube videos, like the “Relaxing Car Drive” video that I’m sure many people have stumbled upon. How did you make these retro, proto-internet scares?

I 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’re 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’m falling back in my seat. We weren’t used to being scared by the internet yet. The internet was still kind of a remotely safe place. There wasn’t social media yet. When things on the internet started to scare us, it’s 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’t allow ourselves to have things they wouldn’t have had.

Did 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?

Yes, 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’re 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’re very rarely warm and fuzzy at the end.

If you want to look at just the emotion of it, when something happens to you when you’re 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’t 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’s been the emotional idea behind this thing that has always been looming in the background of Riley and Mia’s life that is also literally represented by this window in the conclusion of the movie. It’s all in there, and there’s a lot of hidden stuff too in various shots.

There 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?

I think it’s absolutely wonderful. I’ve 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’s because at that time, YouTube as a platform was not taken seriously by Hollywood. If you said you were a YouTube film critic, they’d be like, ‘Cool. Have a nice day.’ 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’s 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’re getting a chance to make movies, because that is the progression of time that we’re in. If YouTube existed in the ’70s or ’80s, I guarantee Scorsese, Spielberg, Robert Rodriguez, all those guys, would have been uploading.