From YouTube to Hollywood, Chris Stuckmann Talks Making His Directorial Debut With Shelby Oaks
Since he was 14 years old, Chris Stuckmann wanted to be a filmmaker. He turned to YouTube in 2009 to share his thoughts on movies, becoming one of the platform’s most respected film critics. “Every time I would see a film, doesn't matter if I was going to review it or I was just watching it just to watch it, I was always looking for some form of inspiration that I could take from that to apply to myself,” Stuckmann told me for Pop Culture Planet. “I do think that movies are my religion and the theater is my church. I go there to learn. I want to be inspired. I want to walk out of there and feel like a rejuvenated, better person. For me, every movie that we've ever seen before […] in some way […] got me one step closer to finally getting something made because I just didn't want to give up.”
Stuckmann’s directorial debut Shelby Oaks has been years in the making and became the most crowdfunded horror movie ever. It follows a woman on a search for her long-lost sister as she learns that a demon from their childhood may have actually been real. He initially planned to shoot the movie with his wife on a very small budget and release it on YouTube. “We were tired of waiting for some powerful person in Hollywood to reach out and be like, ‘You have been blessed with the ability to now make a movie,’” he shared, especially after the realization that insecurities had him “actively pushing” off making a film.
Once the crowdfunding element came in, it allowed the film to get even bigger. “I was leery to launch a campaign because I had never really been that guy who says like, ‘Can you please help me with something? Please give me money.’ I've never done that. It just made me feel uncomfortable,” he explained, but he was blown away by the support. “We realized that we could approach the campaign from the idea of, if you join us on this journey, you're going to get behind the scenes videos of the whole production. Every single week, we had BTS videos that were shot on set that people could watch while we were making the movie in real time. The idea was like, let's get a little mini independent film school going on here for people to join and see what it's like to make an indie movie from the ground up and that was really great.”
From the Philippou brothers to Joe Penna, there has been a rise in movies made by filmmakers who got their start on YouTube. “This has been very important to me over the years because I have very much so experienced the stigma of ‘YouTubers aren't real critics,’ ‘YouTubers aren't real press,’ ‘YouTubers aren't real filmmakers,’” said Stuckmann. It took him over six years of making videos before he finally got into his first press screening. “There are a lot of people in Hollywood who like the way things are and things like YouTube, things like TikTok were challenging the way things were.”
“There had to be people who were like, ‘All right, fine. Yes, fine. We'll invite some of these people. Clearly, they have an audience,’ and I think it's the same for movies. When people like the Philippou brothers who have done Talk To Me and Bring Her Back or Joe Penna who did Arctic and Stowaway, Curry Barker has a movie coming out Obsession, there's this sense of, ‘Okay, I see you guys. I think maybe you can be invited to the party. I don't know. We'll see,’” he explained. “But I also think that it's generational. I think that in the future most new filmmakers will have been on some kind of social platform of some kind. It's pretty much impossible to avoid. If a lot of these platforms existed when we were kids, all the filmmakers that we look to now as these icons, they would have been uploading to those platforms too.”
Horror fans are known for catching all the hidden details in films and Stuckmann teases that there are tons of things to discover in Shelby Oaks. “There's quite a bit of actual hidden things on screen in this movie. I would say somewhere around 10 to 15. I don't want to say what it is, but there are a lot of things in the background throughout the whole film for people to find whether or not they see some of them in the theater or not or on Blu-ray later on or on streaming. It was fun for me to find ways to play around with that and try to find some hidden things in there that we could incorporate,” he revealed. They're not entirely just for fun. There are a few things that are actually like story elements that are in the background where if people do find them eventually they'll unlock a new aspect to the story that I think will be really fun for people.”
“When I was young, my mom took me to the library and she showed me how those microfiche machines work that sift through the old newspaper articles. Being an X Files fan as a kid, we immediately went to the 1947 Roswell, New Mexico UFO incident and we looked at all the headlines of that year and we saw people who were freaking out about UFOs and whether or not flying saucers were real,” Stuckmann shared. “I think that need to research the past and find hidden things has always been prevalent in my brain ever since.”
Explore the mysteries of Shelby Oaks when it hits theaters on October 24.
