When Chris Stuckmann was 10 years old, his mom took him to see an old abandoned amusement park in Ohio. Together, they stood at the edge of the fence and peered inside.
“She showed me this roller coaster that was peeking above the trees — rusted and covered in vines,” Stuckmann tells Polygon. “I was mesmerized, and it always stayed in my mind.”Roughly 25 years later, he returned to that very same spot, Chippewa Lake Park, to film his debut feature film, Shelby Oaks. By then, Stuckmann was a well-established presence on YouTube, where his movie reviews and retrospective videos sometimes rack up millions of views. But to make the leap from critic to filmmaker, he had to call in every favor he could (including raising over a million dollars from his fans) and get creative while filming on a microscopic budget.
“We shot this movie for what most people in Hollywood would call nothing,” Stuckmann says. “There’s a scene literally in my friend’s backyard.”
In theaters for the first time on Oct. 24, Shelby Oaks tells the story of a missing person. Riley Brennan (Sarah Durn) and her friends disappear while investigating an abandoned amusement park on their YouTuber channel Paranormal Paranoids. A decade later, the world has moved on, but Riley’s sister Mia (Camille Sullivan) is still looking for answers. What she finds is darker and more disturbing than anyone could imagine.Shelby Oaks mixes mockumentary and more traditional filmmaking, while exploring a bygone era of internet horror defined by creepypasta campfire stories and lo-fi videos like Relaxing Car Drive. It’s a movie only someone like Stuckmann could conjure up (with a boost from indie distributor Neon, which stepped in to fund a few extra days of filming and special effects) and a first glimpse at what appears to be a promising new voice in the horror film genre.
Ahead of the movie’s release, Polygon talks to Stuckmann about how he made Shelby Oaks on a budget, how Neon’s support changed the film, and how he harnessed early internet horror storytelling to make a new kind of scary movie.
“We can’t afford to build a Ferris wheel”
A Kickstarter for Shelby Oaks went live on March 1, 2022 with the goal of raising $250,000 to fund Stuckmann’s debut feature film. By the end of the day, he had raised $650,000, with the project ultimately bringing in $1,390,845.
That may sound like a lot of money. It’s not. When it came to shoot Shelby Oaks, Stuckmann still relied on real-life locations he knew he could film at for free or cheap (like that abandoned amusement park). An Ohio native, it was his knowledge of the state’s spookiest corners, and the relationships he’d built over the years through his YouTube channel, that gave Shelby Oaks a fighting chance.
“Those locations are one of the reasons we’re punching above our weight class,” Stuckman says.
Aside from the Chippewa Lake Park, he filmed another pivotal scene at Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, Ohio, which sharp-eyed movie fans may recognize as the setting of Shawshank Redemption. Stuckmann filmed a video about Shawshank at the historic prison in 2017 and was still friends with a person who organizes ghost tours of the building. “I always kept that on the back burner,” he says. Years later, he called in a favor.
Other locations fell through. For example, a scene from Shelby Oaks set in a hospital was about to begin shooting when the manager of the hospital found out Stuckmann was making a horror movie and reneged. It was a setback, but they ultimately found another location that fit the tone of the film even better.
“The challenge became: OK, I wrote this location into the script, but that’s a risk, because now we have to get permission to shoot there,” Stuckmann says. “Otherwise, the scene literally doesn’t work. We can’t afford to build a Ferris wheel.”
Stuckmann used every trick in the indie-film book to eke out Shelby Oaks — but he still burned through the entire budget before shooting everything in the script.
“Ramp up the gore”
Despite raising more than five times their intended crowdfunding goal, Stuckmann and his crew still ran out of cash near the end of production. They were able to make strategic cuts and put together a watchable movie that debuted at Fantasia, a genre-focused film festival, in July 2024.
Neon swooped in soon afterwards to buy the rights, and it didn’t take long for the indie film distributor to notice something was missing.
“Neon was very interested in my original script,” Stuckmann says. “They read it, and they came back to me and were like, ‘There’s a couple things in here that you didn’t put in the movie, and we’re just curious why.’ And I told them, ‘Because we ran out of money.’”
So Neon paid for three extra days of filming, which Stuckmann used to add an extra dose of horror to the movie. One “gnarly” death scene, in particular, which another character watches after it’s been recorded on tape, was only possible thanks to those added production days. Additionally, the extra budget paid for more time to shoot the demonic dogs that stalk the protagonist, Mia, as she searches for her missing sister.
Stuckmann also took the opportunity to “ramp up the gore” without needing to rely on computer-generated special effects.
“We had a whole day on green screen where we just splattered blood around,” he says. “We did some really gnarly blood effects to capture real practical blood that we could then composite into the movie, because I didn’t want to do CG blood.”
Aside from Neon’s financial support, Stuckmann also got a big boost from acclaimed horror filmmaker and showrunner Mike Flanagan, who’s listed as an executive producer on Shelby Oaks. The two have been friends since Flanagan’s breakout hit Oculus (2013), and Stuckmann turned to him regularly for guidance.
Stuckmann calls Flanagan his “compass,” offering counsel on who to trust (and who not to trust) in the movie industry.
“If I would mention someone that I had a meeting with soon, he would be like, I’ve heard bad things about them. Maybe don’t take that meeting, and this is pre-Harvey Weinstein Me Too, when a lot of people in Hollywood were still keeping secrets,” Stuckmann says. “And then he’d also also be like, She or he is great. Yes, take that meeting whenever. That’s the type of advice that you can only get from someone who’s lived this experience, who’s been in this world, who understands the ups and downs of the industry. It helped me quite a bit.”
“Is this actually happening?”
Shelby Oaks begins with a fakeout of sorts. The film’s opening sequence is an extended faux-documentary about the disappearance of the Paranormal Paranoids and the viral fame that followed. This lasts just long enough to suggest the entire movie was filmed in mockumentary style, but then, suddenly, the documentary camera stops rolling and the frame broadens to reveal a wider, more traditional shot.
The rest of Shelby Oaks plays out like a modern horror movie. There are scenes where various characters find and watch recorded footage — similar to other scary movies like Sinister or Cannibal Holocaust that blur the line between regular filmmaking and found-footage — but we never return to the mockumentary framing. For Stuckmann, the reason behind this unexpected choice was simple: he had never seen it before.
“We know it’s fiction,” he says. “So why can’t there be cameras that the characters are aware of, but also cameras they’re not aware of?”
Shelby Oaks riffs equally on both low-budget horror classics like The Blair Witch Project and even lower-budget early internet creepypasta. But while Stuckmann accepts that the brilliance of the Blair Witch marketing campaign, in which audiences couldn’t be sure if the footage was real or not, “can never be replicated,” he sees an opportunity to do something new in mining the primitive online horror of the late ‘90s and early 2000s.
Stuckmann recalls watching a new type of horror develop organically online through scary stories shared in long-abandoned forums and unexpected YouTube jumpscares. Movies like Slender Man have attempted to adapt popular horror memes into mainstream movies, but Shelby Oaks does something different with a focus on the type of people who created those memes in the first place.
“I haven’t really seen the early period of YouTube explored in movies, especially from the lens of horror,” Stuckmann says. “I haven’t seen someone tackle the aughts when it comes to how we were digesting things that were scary.”
It’s a topic that connects cleanly to the movie’s other big theme: paranormal investigations. This one predates the internet, but there’s no denying the two have overlapped in some interesting and unnerving ways, especially in the early days of YouTube. At a time when the platform was mostly filled with real-life footage uploaded from digital cameras, it was a lot easier to take what you saw at face value.
“No one was looking out for AI or VFX on YouTube back then,” Stuckmann says. “It felt like you could see something real. I would see videos like that, and I would think, Man, are aliens real? Is this actually happening?”
“I’m ready to go”
So what’s next for Stuckmann? While his future as a director still depends on the box office success of Shelby Oaks to a certain degree, he’s already hard at work lining up his next project (and the one after that, too).
“I’ve got a lot of spec scripts,” Stuckmann says. “I’ve done many pitches over the past few months.”
One project in particular seems to be gaining momentum as his Shelby Oaks follow-up, although he can’t say much until the deal is official.
“I’ve got something that’s got a lot of heat right now, and I’m hoping I can have a yes on that pretty soon,” Stuckmann says. “It’s got producers attached. There’s some talent interested. I’m just waiting for that elusive dry ink.”
And while he’s mostly focused on horror, Stuckmann isn’t limiting himself to one genre either. His YouTube movie reviews run the gamut from sci-fi to action to KPop Demon Hunters. So why not the same for his own films?
“I love the genre space,” Stuckmann says. “Most of my scripts are either horror or action thrillers. There’s some sci-fi in there.”
He’s also got a very personal project that he’d like to pursue eventually; a film inspired by his own experience growing up as a Jehovah’s Witness and leaving the faith in his early 20s.
“I do have one drama that I wrote about Jehovah’s Witnesses, and I would love to make it one day,” Stuckmann says.
Stuckmann isn’t the first YouTuber to transition into filmmaking, but he’s determined to carve his own path, starting with a unique look at how internet-inspired horror can be presented on the big screen. And looking to the future, one thing seems clear: He’s willing to do whatever it takes to keep making movies.
“I’m ready to go.”
