Copyright The Hollywood Reporter
[This story contains spoilers for Shelby Oaks.] Chris Stuckmann has turned his lifelong dream into a reality. It was never about becoming the world’s most successful movie critic on YouTube; it was about making a theatrically released motion picture. That ambition is now known as Shelby Oaks, which, after two weeks in the marketplace, is headed toward profitability with a $4 million-plus gross worldwide. In July of 2024, The Hollywood Reporter caught up with the Ohio native just a few hours before the world premiere of his feature directorial debut at Fantasia in Montreal. If you want to learn all about his background as a prominent YouTuber, as well as the chain of events that led to a record-setting Kickstarter campaign and the backing of Mike Flanagan/Neon, then that interview now serves as part one of this two-part piece. The particulars of the film itself are the current focus, beginning with what happened after Fantasia’s premiere. Neon would soon fund three days’ worth of additional photography, essentially doubling the sum that Stuckmann and his producer Aaron B. Koontz had applied toward principal photography in 2022. Due to fees, backer rewards and various other expenses, the original production budget was well below the $1.4 million that accumulated on Kickstarter. The overall production spend, including pickups, is now just north of $1 million. “Neon went back to read my original script and said, ‘Hey, there’s a few things in here that we really like, and we’re wondering why you didn’t shoot them.’ And I said, ‘The truth is we ran out of money,’’ Stuckmann tells THR. “So we got to do three pickup days. I got to do some of these key moments that were always in my head and that I had mourned the passing of.” [Spoiler Warning.] For starters, he widened the scope of his ending despite having the same destination. After the Brennan sisters, Mia (Camille Sullivan) and Riley (Sarah Durn), reunite for the first time since Riley’s disappearance 12 years earlier, they soon struggle over the fate of Riley’s demonically possessed baby. Mia — who’s blinded by the allure of a newborn that’s long eluded her and her husband — doesn’t heed Riley’s warning about the nature of the child, and in the course of their melee, Riley accidentally crashes through the second-story window of their family home. In the original Fantasia cut, Riley died upon impact, signifying that the big bad incubus, Tarion, got his desired outcome, one where the infertile Mia raises the cursed baby as her own. But in the theatrical cut, Riley briefly survives the drop before being devoured by Tarion’s paw soldiers, the Hellhounds. During additional photography, Stuckmann and co. brought in dogs from Siberia, Russia, and Sweden in order to sell Riley’s brutal death as it was once scripted. “It was really amazing to be able to come back and have this body built [for Riley]. [The dogs] all had these very specific expertises for how they bite and how they chew and what they get excited about chewing,” Stuckmann shares. “So it was really just trying to hammer home what we wanted it to be originally.” The other key addition is a flashback to Young Mia and Young Riley in the same bedroom that would later lead to Riley’s violent end. Young Mia, in an effort to comfort her troubled younger sister as she slept, witnessed Tarion in the window, further establishing that Tarion was playing the long game all along. He not only orchestrated Riley’s abduction many years later for the sake of conceiving a child with his existing victim, Wilson Miles, but he also knew he would need Mia to raise the child, something Riley outright refused to do. So the new flashback is introduced earlier in the movie and recurs in the final scene to solidify Mia’s role in Tarion’s grand design. The exclamation point of the film is also brand new. It used to conclude on a wide shot of the Brennan house with a pack of Hellhounds surrounding it, driving home the point that Mia’s house is the new hub for Tarion and co. just as the house of Wilson’s mother, Norma (Robin Bartlett), once was. But now the film ends on a closeup of a traumatized Mia being bonded to Tarion, indicating she’ll have to serve him and the baby for an indefinite amount of time until the vicious cycle can be passed on to yet another family. “Riley is the surrogate in a way. Riley is the person that is used to make this baby come to fruition, and it’s ultimately so that the one that Tarion is really after [meaning Mia] can continue forth [as the intended parent or adoptive mother],” Stuckmann says. Shelby Oaks initially presented itself as a pseudo-documentary about the disappearance of YouTuber Riley Brennan and three of her murdered paranormal investigator friends, utilizing their found footage to construct an account of what happened. However, the big reveal — one that THR had to keep quiet at the time of the Fantasia premiere — was that it broke free of this format at the 17-minute mark in order to tell a more traditional narrative. Stuckmann had hoped to keep this secret intact until the actual theatrical release, but the powers that be in Neon’s highly acclaimed marketing department preferred otherwise. “There was definitely some advocating early on from me: ‘Is there a way that we can still keep this a secret?’ But Neon is incredible with marketing, and they’re a filmmaker-first company,” Stuckmann says. “I have had the greatest experience of my life working with them, and I’m very okay to let go of the reins.” Below, during a spoiler conversation with THR, Stuckmann also discusses the highly personal stories he channeled into the film both knowingly and unknowingly, before addressing his future with Neon. *** We last spoke on the eve of Shelby Oaks’ Fantasia premiere in 2024, and Neon had just announced its acquisition of the film a few days prior. For the uninitiated, that interview also covered your YouTube background, the film’s origin story and Mike Flanagan’s involvement. What transpired from there? Well, Neon went back to read my original script and said, “Hey, there’s a few things in here that we really like, and we’re wondering why you didn’t shoot them.” And I said, “The truth is we ran out of money. We had to make some sacrifices.” And they were like, “Look, we think there’s value in these elements. Would you like to have three extra days to do them?” And I said, “Hell yes, I would. That would be incredible.” So we got to do three pickup days, and while the term reshoots in the industry does tend to refer to much longer periods of time, three pickup days allowed us to do some more dog work and enhance some of the gore in the movie. I got to do some of these key moments that were always in my head and that I had mourned the passing of. They were just going to live in my head as these couple unseen moments, but now we got to put them in the movie, which is exciting. As far as I can tell, you added the Paranoids’ 911 call, as well as the face gore when Mia is watching the Paranoids die. Most importantly, there’s now a flashback of Young Mia seeing Tarion in Young Riley’s bedroom window. There’s also a scene where Mia finds Riley’s demonolatry book, and the prison scare has new Hellhound violence, as does the ending. We had a whole day with dogs because our dogs in the original shoot did not quite cooperate with us. We had a tough time with the dogs. So we imported dogs from Siberia, Russia, and Sweden for this reshoot, and we had them all come in for a whole day in a green screen environment. We then composited them into the movie in various scenes. As I learned shooting an indie movie, there’s a reason people say, “Don’t shoot with kids, and don’t shoot with animals.” It just takes so much time. To get one closeup of a dog takes quadruple the amount of time it takes to get a closeup of an adult person. And on an indie film, when you literally do not have budget for overtime, that is the type of thing that can be detrimental to a production. You also trimmed 11 minutes from the Fantasia cut. Several scenes got shorter, but you also cut out a sequence in between the prison scene and the arrival at Norma’s house. Originally, the documentarians come back, and there’s more backstory about the Miles family’s amusement park. It all further reinforced how nobody believes Mia’s theory that Riley is still alive. And then Riley’s clairvoyant sketches as a teenager point Mia toward going out to the amusement park. One such sketch from years earlier even depicted Wilson Miles’ recent suicide. Did the new editor (Brett W. Bachman) bring a different perspective on what you did and didn’t need? Yeah, a big goal was like, “Hey, fresh eyes. Let’s just look at this from someone who hasn’t been living with it for multiple years and see what his POV would be.” The ending is also somewhat different. Riley survives the fall unlike before, only she’s quickly eaten to death by the aforementioned Hellhounds. Tarion then bonds himself to a terrified Mia in the broken bedroom window until the closing credits. Previously, the movie ended on a grand wide shot of Hellhounds surrounding the house, symbolizing that Mia’s house was the new hub of evil like Norma’s house once was. Did you instead want to drive home the point that Mia was also, if not more so, Tarion’s target all along? Definitely. The idea was to make sure that the focus is on Mia. But there was also this element of visceralness in the original draft’s violence that was just unattainable on our budget despite being the highest-funded Kickstarter for horror. A million dollars is a lot for a person to have, but not for a movie. I remember the day when we were shooting that [original] final moment, and we had a drone up to get the shot. We were all just looking at each other, and we just really wanted this to feel bigger. There was this creeping realization of, “I hope this is the type of thing that other people don’t think about and that I’m only thinking about what I wanted it to be.” So it was really amazing to be able to come back and have this body built [for Riley]. That’s what the three different dogs from all over the world were used for, and they all had these very specific expertises for how they bite and how they chew and what they get excited about chewing. The trainer spoke three different languages, and so he’d be screaming in these commands, which was quite entertaining. So it was really just trying to hammer home what we wanted it to be originally, and gratefully, Neon gave us three extra days to do it. At the time of our Fantasia chat, we couldn’t mention that the movie breaks free of its pseudo-documentary framing and transitions into an actual narrative. That’s fairly common when talking in and around early festival premieres. But was there ever a reality where you were going to try and save that reveal for the actual movie theater? Yes, that was my initial hope, but the reality of marketing a movie for a global audience is that I have to sit back and let the professionals handle that. Yes, there was definitely some advocating early on from me: “Is there a way that we can still keep this a secret?” But Neon is incredible with marketing, and they’re a filmmaker-first company. I have had the greatest experience of my life working with them, and I’m very okay to let go of the reins and let them take it from here. We talked previously about how you and your wife’s fertility story inspired Mia and Robert’s (Brendan Sexton III) own fertility story, but we couldn’t mention Riley’s nightmarish fertility story as well. I suppose it’s a heightened version of the two most common fertility stories where people either give up or they keep going as long as they can. Anyway, how do you view these parallel fertility stories? It’s something I’ve purposely left up to interpretation. Mia and Robert’s attempts at having kids are hinted at throughout the movie, and you see that there’s this crib filled with boxes. She mentions in the doc about how they were trying to have kids, but it didn’t happen. You can tell that she’s skirting the topic a little bit. And later in the movie, when Norma asked her, “Do you have any kids?” she was like, “No, we never found the time.” And Norma was like, “Are you sure there’s nothing else to the story?” And Mia was like, “Wait, what do you know?” It turns around. So, in my head canon, Mia is not able to have kids, and she doesn’t want to talk about it. Riley is the surrogate in a way. Riley is the person that is used to make this baby come to fruition, and it’s ultimately so that the one that Tarion is really after [meaning Mia] can continue forth [as the intended parent or adoptive mother]. My wife and I did struggle with [fertility] quite a bit, and I’m so happy now that we have two amazing 4-year-old kids that I have to pick up from school in ten minutes. It was a long journey for us, personally, to explore that realm and then try to put a little bit of it in the movie. [Writer’s Note: Samantha Elizabeth, Stuckmann’s wife, received co-story credit.] “She finally let me go.” Assuming Wilson was the previous baby that Norma offered up to Tarion, did Norma let her son go because he and Riley had finally birthed his replacement? That’s how I view it, yeah. “Your purpose has been fulfilled, and you are no longer necessary.” And then Tarion eventually said the same thing to Riley. Yeah. You were conscious of the fertility influence, but it wasn’t until later that you realized how much of your sister’s excommunication from your former religion inspired this story. Riley’s song “Big Sister” is still in the movie, but it was more prominent in the Fantasia cut. Mia sang it to Riley inside Norma’s dungeon to trigger her memories. When that song was being put together and you heard the lyric, “Big sister, won’t you find me?” did you realize, “Oh, this is me asking my big sister to find me”? The approach to that song was actually the first thing that clued it into me. I have artist friends who show me their work sometimes, and they’re like, “I don’t know where this came from.” And I’m like, “Dude, that reminds me of this story you told me.” And they’re like, “Oh my God, you’re right.” So it’s really easy to approach something creatively and not realize you’re putting some of your own self into it. I have two older sisters. One of them was always around, and one of them left forcibly. So this story felt so easy for me to access that emotional part of my brain, but it wasn’t until I was looking into some of the deeper elements, like that song, where I went, “Oh my God, of course. This is coming from a very dark place.” The Paranormal Paranoids’ YouTube videos were uploaded early on as an ARG campaign. This was around six weeks before the project was officially announced in the trades. Was that the first bit of business that you and producer Aaron B. Koontz did together in an official capacity? Yeah, that was the first thing we did, officially. It was a few months after COVID shut down the world. I think Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning might’ve been close to shooting or was shooting. But the four actors and I just went out into the woods and shot a lot of these videos. I wore a mask the whole time, and I was 30 feet behind them. Those are some of my fondest memories, really. We were out there shooting things and getting really excited about [the beginning of Shelby Oaks]. Did you have to reshoot any of them during principal photography to better serve the narrative? They are all unchanged. They’re still on YouTube too. When you watch movies now, is there an element that you focus on more intently than you did before you made a movie? I’m now more interested in how many days someone had to shoot something. I was just at Beyond Fest, and there’s this really fun movie called Night Patrol. There’s action and gore and all this stuff. The director [Ryan Prows] then talked about how he had 16 days to shoot it, and my brain exploded. I was like, “That’s the most impressive thing I’ve ever heard.” Our principal photography was 20 days, and then we had three pickup days. So what you can do in a short amount of time is something that’s always on my mind now, because most indie filmmakers are so constrained by time. What have you learned about Shelby Oaks through other people’s reactions and reviews? It’s really hard for me to view my film as scary because I’ve seen it 600 times. I’ve seen it from its inception point of no sound, no color grading, no score, when everything was raw. So I’ve had a lot of folks come up to me after screenings and say, “That movie scared me.” And I would say, “Okay, good!” (Laughs.) Because I didn’t know anymore. You go through the whole process, and then the only way to experience it in a new way is with a crowd. You hear gasps or reactions or whatever, and you’re like, “Okay, that thing we tried seems to be working alright.” So it’s exciting because you never fully know if scenes are working in the way that you hope they do until you see it with a crowd or people tell you. Have you and Neon talked about any other ideas of yours? Yes, I have pitched them something, and I’m hoping to have information about that soon.
