Over the last 16 years, Chris Stuckmann has become one of the most popular film critics on YouTube. His eponymous channel has more than two million subscribers and has amassed over 789 million views.
Despite this success, Stuckmann says, “YouTube was a bit of a distraction” from his ultimate goal of becoming a filmmaker. “I’ve wanted to make movies since I was a kid,” he explains. “YouTube was really just my way to connect with other film fans.”
Nine years after he and his wife, Samantha Elizabeth, thought of the story of “Shelby Oaks,” Stuckmann got to step behind the camera. His feature debut mixes found footage with the supernatural, horror, and mystery genres to create a truly original experience. The film revolves around Mia Brennan (Camille Sullivan) and her attempts to find her younger sister, Riley (Sarah Durn), who went missing years earlier while investigating the abandoned town of Shelby Oaks.
Here’s how Stuckmann funded and made the horror movie, as well as his advice for burgeoning filmmakers.
Give the genre your own spin.
Before “Shelby Oaks,” Stuckmann had seven or eight other spec scripts that he would pitch to producers to no avail. But “Shelby Oaks” kept piquing people’s interest, in part because the found footage portions could be shot efficiently at low cost.
“That definitely perked the ears of a lot of producers,” says the filmmaker, who soon made the project his priority. “That made me lean in and listen, because when you have nothing to your name in regards to credits, anytime anything starts getting heat, you follow the heat. As soon as ‘Shelby Oaks’ started getting interest from producers, it was very apparent to me that I was going to follow the heat.”
In order to make the project stand out, Stuckmann decided to explore the found footage and horror genres. “Every time I would watch a mockumentary, I would always think: We are all aware this is fiction. Why can’t we play around with it? Why can’t we exit the lens of a nonfiction camera, enter the lens of a fictional camera the characters don’t know exists, and play around with the mixed media format? That was always the idea.”
Stuckmann and Elizabeth turned their original idea into a sketch and uploaded it to YouTube in 2016. The pair had so much fun creating the video that it made them realize they were “tired of not making things,” he says. They’d stay up all night discussing what to do with the story; their initial plan was to make “Shelby Oaks” with their savings and put it on the platform.
However, after repeatedly being told that he should just go out with his phone and make the movie, Stuckmann decided that he wanted to find funding so that he could fulfill his vision. “We live in a world where everybody’s trying to make stuff,” he says. “Everybody has a camera in their pocket. It’s oversaturated and harder to stand out.” So Stuckemann decided to go to places full of people who could make his creative dream come true.
Go to film festivals.
The breakthrough moment for Stuckmann and “Shelby Oaks” occurred at the 2019 Fantastic Fest, when he met Aaron B. Koontz, the CEO of Paper Street Pictures. Stuckmann had started to attend genre film festivals with the sole purpose of meeting filmmakers who were creating the types of films he wanted to make. “The secret sauce for me making ‘Shelby Oaks’ was going to genre festivals, meeting like-minded filmmakers, and just becoming friends with them,” he explains.
Stuckmann traveled solo to Austin for Fantastic Fest with the intention of making industry connections. But ahead of the festival, he told himself he wasn’t going to overtly sell himself and plead to people for money to make his movie. Instead, he wanted to get to know them first, then bring up “Shelby Oaks” and his ambitions organically.
While attending Fantastic Fest Debates—an event in which film fans argue over a movie-related topic in a boxing ring before actually donning gloves and duking it out—Stuckmann was introduced to Koontz by filmmaker-producer Josh Lobo. “Me and Aaron just talked about movies that we’d seen at the festival,” he says. “That was it. Eventually, while the fight was happening, he asked me, ‘Are you working on anything?’ ”
Stuckmann took the opportunity to pitch “Shelby Oaks” to Koontz. “It was only a treatment at that stage,” he says. “But he really loved the pitch. I left the festival with his email. I just kept in touch with him.”
Once the partnership was established, Stuckmann launched a Kickstarter campaign to further fund the film. The campaign ultimately raised $1,390,845—quite a bit beyond its original goal of $250,000. Years of work, countless festival meetings, and one wildly successful crowdfunding campaign later, “Shelby Oaks” hit theaters on Oct. 24—proof that Stuckmann’s patience and strategy paid off.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
