Spoiler Alert: This article contains spoilers for the ending of “Shelby Oaks,” now in theaters.
So who took Riley Brennan?
Director Chris Stackman makes his directorial debut with Shelby Oaks, a neon horror film that follows the disappearance of YouTuber and amateur ghost hunter Riley Brennan (Sarah Dern). Stuckman, who began his career as a film critic and essayist on YouTube, turned director with horror films that deftly fuse media and at times feel like mockumentaries ripped straight from the video platform.
Camille Sullivan stars as Mia Brennan, who, along with her YouTube group Paranormal Paranoids, continues to search for her sister Riley, who disappeared 12 years ago in the remote town of Shelby Oaks. The film begins like a fictional documentary about Riley’s disappearance, but unlike recent studio films, it turns into a supernatural horror using found footage and scripted scares. It’s like “The Blair Witch Project” for the YouTube generation, and Stackman is making the most of his years of experience on the platform.
The director talks to Variety about the origins of YouTube, filming with an old-fashioned camcorder, and the shocking ending.
Courtesy of Everett Collection
Why was “Shelby Oaks” the story you wanted to tell in your directorial debut?
I didn’t want to give myself a chance of being turned down by the producers I met, so I wrote probably six or seven spec scripts, went to film festivals and met so many filmmakers, and spent a lot of time trying to get to a place where I could meet people and network and make connections with somebody. We have been trying for a long time and it finally helped us get the movie off the ground. I didn’t want to end up in this situation with just one script and pitch. So I attended many film festivals, hoping to meet producers with many scripts and proposals. When I happened to meet Aaron Koontz at Fantastic Fest in 2019, I had two or three things I could suggest to him at the time, and “Shelby Oaks” was the one that caught his attention. From there, the development process began.
I’m from the Midwest and had never heard of Darke County, Ohio before. How did you choose that as your setting?
I was thinking of setting it in a general area of Ohio. Shelby Oaks is, of course, a fictional town, but as soon as I discovered it had the name “Darke” and an E, it felt more like an artsy farm country, which is exactly what I wanted. Because a lot of my spec scripts are set in Dark County, this little mini-movie world that may or may not happen someday.
How did you combine mockumentary footage, YouTube found footage, and scripted horror?
There’s a phenomenon I’ve witnessed over the years, starting on YouTube in 2009. It’s that people like to see other people looking at things. Reaction videos are a very popular trend. There’s something very appealing about the idea of people taking in information. There’s a scene where Mia watches the tape and you’re kind of feeling her emotions. She is the conduit for these emotions. I really love the idea of mixing media. Because I think that’s how we all live now. We all use TikTok, YouTube, TV, movies, audiobooks, and physical books, but nothing is set in stone for all of us. We all experience media in different ways.
Has there ever been a full mockumentary version of this?
It started entirely as a mockumentary. That was inevitably the first pitch we ever made. The original idea for the film was that I was tired of waiting, so I self-funded it, about $20,000, and posted it on YouTube. Eventually the idea kept evolving and kept coming. As I was writing it, I couldn’t stop. That was all, and now I needed to figure out where this was going. What I’ve come up with is that every time I see a mockumentary that’s fiction, I know it’s fiction. Just kidding. I understand that most of them were created out of budgetary necessity, but we’re all in on the joke, so why not have some fun with it?If we have cameras that the actors are aware of, why can’t we also have cameras that the actors are not aware of and just act in that world?
Some of the found footage jump scares feel like a throwback to the early days of scary YouTube videos, such as those “relaxing car drive” videos that many people have stumbled across. How did we create these retro internet primitive horrors?
I think it has something to do with YouTube, the internet, and the Creepypasta generation. We all look for ways to explain how art makes us feel through past works of art. We’re always trying to find ways to connect. But we’re in the midst of a generational shift, with filmmakers starting to break out of the early days of YouTube. Not all inspiration comes from movies and TV anymore. A lot of it comes from the internet. Like you said, I remember watching a relaxing car video a long time ago, and the image came on at the end and I collapsed in my seat. We were still new to the horrors of the internet. The internet was still some kind of safe place. There was no social media yet. When things on the internet start scaring us, it’s a whole new world of potential horrors that can be mined. Mixed media elements were very important to me to express different types of horror. Found footage horror is very different from traditional narrative horror, not only visually but also in sound. For the traditional narrative portion of the film, we really opened up the sound channels and explored more possibilities of what you can do with sound. For the first half of the film, we tried to limit it a little more to the kinds of sounds you’d expect to hear from an old-fashioned video camera. For the “Paranoid” episode, I filmed it all myself using pre-2008 equipment. The video camera was from 2006 and the microphone we used was from 2007. We didn’t allow ourselves to have what they didn’t have.
Did you always imagine the ending to be gut-wrenching? How much of it did you want fans to interpret?
Yes, I was never asked any questions. All of my favorite horror movies tend to have memorable endings. Naturally, if you want your script to be seen, there will be people who will request it, especially producers who don’t want to take any risks. I was always adamant that this is how it has to be. When I think of all my favorite horrors, very few end with me feeling warm and fuzzy.
If you just want to look at that emotion, you could literally think of it as a crack in the window, when something happened to you when you were young that left a lasting scar or some sort of trauma. If you leave it alone without fixing it and trying to improve your life, it will fester and grow and become spidery and worse, and eventually you’ll probably be eaten alive. That’s the emotional idea behind this thing that’s always looming in the background of Riley and Mia’s lives, and it’s literally expressed by this window at the end of the movie. Everything is there and there is a lot hidden in the various shots as well.
There are plenty of filmmakers who started on YouTube and have since gone on to land Hollywood deals, like Danny and Michael Philippou and Curry Barker. How does it feel to watch them grow since they started online?
I think it’s really great. I talked to Danny and Mike, and Danny and Callie were on the podcast. When I started my YouTube channel in 2009, it took about six years before I could get press tickets for advance screenings of movies. That’s because YouTube as a platform wasn’t taken seriously in Hollywood at the time. If you tell them you’re a movie critic on YouTube, they’ll say, “Cool.” Have a nice day. ‘Well, when you go to the premiere, what do you see everywhere? YouTubers and TikTokers. Hollywood needed to take the platform seriously. I think it’s the same with movies. There’s a new generation of people in their 30s or late 20s who are starting Vine, TikTok, and YouTube. Now they have a chance to make a movie. Because that’s the progress of the times. If YouTube had existed in the ’70s and ’80s, I’m pretty sure Scorsese, Spielberg, Robert Rodriguez, all those guys would have been uploading it.
