SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for the ending “Shelby Oaks“, now playing in cinemas.
So, who kidnapped Riley Brennan?
Director Chris Stuckmann makes her directorial debut with Neon's horror Shelby Oaks, which follows the disappearance of YouTuber and amateur ghost hunter Riley Brennan (Sarah Dern). After starting his career as a film critic and essayist on YouTube, Stuckmann moves into directing with a horror film that cleverly blends media and at times feels like a mockumentary ripped straight from the video platform.
Camille Sullivan plays Mia Brennan, who searches for her little sister Riley after she disappeared 12 years ago in the remote town of Shelby Oaks with her YouTube group, The Paranormal Paranoids. The film begins as a fictional documentary about Riley's disappearance, but then turns into a supernatural horror that uses found footage and scripts unlike any recent studio film. It's something of a “Blair Witch Project” for the YouTube generation, and Stuckmann uses his years of experience on the platform to maximum effect.
WITH Diversitythe director talks about his YouTube origins, filming on old video cameras and the shocking ending.
Courtesy of the Everett Collection
Why was Shelby Oaks the story you wanted to tell with your directorial debut?
I didn't want to give the producers that I was dating a chance to turn me down, so I wrote probably six or seven scripts, went to film festivals, met with a lot of different directors, and spent a lot of time trying to meet people and network and get to a place where I could connect with someone. This finally helped me start working on the film because I had been trying for so long. I didn't want to go into these situations with just one script and presentation. So I attended a lot of film festivals in hopes of meeting producers with more scripts and pitches. When I ran into Aaron Koontz at Fantastic Fest in 2019, I had two or three different things to pitch to him at the time, and Shelby Oaks caught his attention. From that moment the process of its development began.
I'm from the Midwest, but I've never heard of Darke County in Ohio before. How did you choose this as your setting?
I was trying to think of a general area in Ohio to place it in. Obviously Shelby Oakes is a fictional character, but once I discovered the name “Dark” and it had an “E” in it, making it more artsy and farmhouse-y, it's literally exactly what I want. I take a Castle Rock-type approach because a lot of my scripts are set in Darke County, this little mini-cinematic universe that may or may not happen one day.
How did you mix mockumentary footage, found footage on YouTube, and a horror script?
Having been on YouTube since 2009, I have observed a phenomenon that I have witnessed for many years: people like to watch people watch things. Reaction videos are a very, very popular trend. There is something very attractive about seeing how a person processes information. There's an episode with Mia where she's watching the tape and you're kind of there where she's feeling her emotions. She is your guide to these emotions. I really like the idea of ​​mixing media because I think that's how we live now. We all use TikTok, YouTube, TV, movies, audiobooks, paper books – there is no one specific thing for all of us. We all perceive media differently.
Has there ever been a version of this film that was a complete mockumentary?
It started out completely mockumentary. The very first presentation we ever made was out of necessity. My first idea for this movie was that I would finance it with about $20,000 and put it on YouTube because I was tired of waiting. Eventually the ideas kept evolving and kept coming. While I was writing, I couldn't stop. That was it, and now I needed to figure out where it would lead. I realized that any time you watch a mockumentary that is fictional, you know it is fictional. You get the joke. I understand that most of them are made out of budgetary necessity, but since we're all in on the joke, why don't we have some fun? We have cameras that the actors know about, why can't we have cameras that they don't know about and just act in that world?
Some of the found footage of jump scares is reminiscent of the early days of scary videos on YouTube, e.g. Video “Relaxing driving” I'm sure many people have stumbled across this. How did you create these retro, proto-Internet horror stories?
I really think it has something to do with YouTube, the internet, and the creepypasta generation. We all look for ways to describe how art makes us feel through works of art from the past. We are always trying to find a way to connect. But now we're going through a generational shift where filmmakers are starting to emerge from the early days of YouTube. Not all inspiration comes from movies or television anymore. Many of them are taken from the Internet. Like you mentioned that relaxing car video, I remember watching it once and at the end this thing popped up and I fell into my seat. We are not yet used to being afraid of the Internet. The Internet was still a relatively safe place. There were no social networks yet. When things on the Internet started to scare us, there was a whole new world of potential horror to be mined. The mixed media element was very important for me to represent different types of fears. Found footage scares are very different from traditional narrative scares, not only in visual presentation but also in sound. In the traditional narrative portion of the film, we really opened up the sound channels and explored a lot more possibilities of what we could do with sound. In the early parts of the film, we tried to limit ourselves a little more to the types of sounds that would come out of an old-school video camera. In the episodes of Paranormal Paranoids, I filmed them myself using equipment manufactured before 2008. The video camera was produced in 2006. The microphone we used was from 2007. We didn't allow ourselves to have anything they didn't have.
Did you always imagine the ending as a dark gut punch? How much of this did you want to leave open to fan interpretation?
Yes, I never had any questions. All of my favorite horror films have an ending that is memorable. Obviously, when you're trying to pitch your script, there will be people making requests, especially some of the less risky producers. I've always been very adamant that this is the way it should be. When I think of all my favorite horror films, they rarely have a warm and fuzzy ending.
If you only want to look at the emotions when something happens to you when you are younger and leaves a scar or some kind of trauma that stays with you, you can literally look at it as a crack in a window. If you don't fix it or try to improve your life, you'll just leave it there to fester and grow and web into something worse, eventually it will probably eat you alive. It's this emotional idea that has always loomed in the background of Riley and Mia's lives and is literally represented by this window at the end of the film. Everything is there, and there is also a lot hidden in different frames.
There are so many directors like Danny, Michael Philippou, and Curry Barker who are getting deals in Hollywood after they started working on YouTube. What is it like to see them grow after starting online?
I think it's just wonderful. I talked to Danny and Mike, and Danny and Curry were on my podcast. When I launched my YouTube channel in 2009, it took about six years before I was able to get press tickets for films at extended screenings. This is because Hollywood didn't take YouTube seriously as a platform at the time. If you said you were a YouTube film critic, they'd say, “Cool.” Have a good day.' So when you go to a premiere, what do you see everywhere? YouTubers and tiktokers. Hollywood has had to take platforms seriously. I think it's the same with cinema. There is a new generation of people in their 30s and 20s who are starting to use Vine, TikTok and YouTube. Now they have a chance to make films because we live in such progress. If YouTube existed in the 70s or 80s, I guarantee Scorsese, Spielberg, Robert Rodriguez and all these guys would have been uploading it.
