“Shelby Oaks” is average. Not great. Not bad. Just my. That’s troubling news for the studio Neon and even scarier for writer/director Chris Stuckmanna YouTube film critic from Ohio who made the jump to feature filmmaking in Hollywood thanks to Mike Flanagan. Stuckmann’s directorial debut made history as Neon’s first-ever major release set for Halloween (a historically lucrative box office window) and, whether the filmmaker likes it or not, “Shelby Oaks” is a critical test case for the internet-creator-to-feature-director pipeline.
“Shelby Oaks” earned $2.35 million in its opening weekend and would already be a triumph if it had stayed on the low budget horror flick it debuted to critics at Fantasia Fest 2024. But when Neon bought the film just before the world premiere — and later injected roughly $1 million in reshoots that doesn’t improve the story much — Stuckmann’s scrappy underdog became a mainstream Frankenstein’s monster, some horror fans frankly wanted to have to see fail.
What happens with “Shelby Oaks” and Stuckmann’s career after it has big implications for the future of indie film, and it may say even more about the headwinds facing the entertainment industry. From the Hollywood heavyweight that brought you the reigning Best Picture winner ‘Anora’, ‘Shelby Oaks’ is a found motion picture about a missing paranormal investigator (Sarah Durn) and the grieving sister (Camille Sullivan) who will stop at nothing to find her. Stuckmann was equally determined to make his first film. What went wrong?
High number of subscribers < Quality filmmaking
A24 used the millions of people who follow Danny and Michael Philippou on YouTube to turn around “Talk to Me” (2022) and “Bring Her Back” (2025) to unprecedented success stories for the studio. The brothers’ first feature was picked up from Sundance — for an amount that’s not public but estimated to be somewhere in the low seven figures — and it grossed $91 million worldwide. It’s an outlier, but arguably what Neon was hoping for with “Shelby Oaks.” Stuckmann today has 2 million subscribers on YouTube, while the Philippou brothers have 6.9 million under the account name RackaRacka.
Shiver looks back on his collaboration with famous TikTokers Kris Collins and Celina Meyers for “House on Eden” positively. The comparatively small summer release wasn’t nearly as successful as “Talk to Me” or “Bring Her Back,” and “Shelby Oaks” is much better known thanks to its national marketing campaign. But by using many of the same lo-fi techniques that Stuckmann relied on for his film, “House on Eden” is better in part because it wasn’t so obviously affected by studio interference. Suffice it to say, there are plenty of filmmakers playing the Bring Your Own Audience game in Hollywood these days – but digital notoriety won’t translate into mammoth ticket sales unless the film is seriously worth seeing.
Studio interference undermines fan support
To be clear, Neon should still make its money back. We don’t know how much the studio bought it for, but $2.35 million is a good enough start, and the company should break even this weekend or next. When Neon sells the international rights, it can also soften the blow on domestic performance. But the very first “Shelby Oaks” investors — Stuckmann’s OG backers who crowdfunded over $1.3 million so he could make the film — are divided by the black box the production went into when Neon came on board.
Crowdfunding can provide exceptional word of mouth, but if you promise “unprecedented” access and transparency within the film production system like Stuckmann did, you have to deliver. Some stand by him. Others believe he sold out. Either way, the damage is done, and Stuckmann will be hard-pressed to find that kind of unbridled support online again. Go check out the “Shelby Oaks” Kickstarter page or the comments on his latest movie reviews on YouTube for a taste.
There’s a Discord managed by producer Aaron Koontz where the biggest grassroots “Shelby Oaks” supporters reportedly got more updates than the rest of Stuckmann’s fanbase. But after speaking with IndieWire about the record over the summer, Koontz declined to comment further. The reshoots have even caused some cinephiles to question the honesty of their favorite critics. It doesn’t seem like Stuckmann’s team made much of an effort to encourage re-reviews of his film after it was significantly altered after Fantasia 2024. It’s an unimportant wrinkle on most remakes, but a thorn in the side of those who see “Shelby Oaks” as undermining the art form Stuckmann once championed.
Don’t waste your weekends around Halloween
You can thank The “Saw” franchise for bringing the annual Halloween release into the 21st century, but Stuckmann faced his own kind of reverse bear trap when he agreed to place the “Shelby Oaks” release around October 31st. It was a title that already had too much pressure on it. The premiere date for “Shelby Oaks” has changed more times than you can reliably count, and the Internet doesn’t rest when it wants access to illegal content. If you’re positioning your movie as a serious draw for horror fans during their favorite season, the last movie you present needs to be an event worth seeing.
As Stuckmann’s mentor, Flanagan helped get his boy through the door. Close friends with top execs at Neon, who released his own film “The Life of Chuck” earlier this year, Flanagan may also have tripped up Stuckmann by getting the first feature filmmaker into bed with a studio that by now is too big for this kind of film. Worse, Neon didn’t trust the product Stuckmann had already made and put the film through significant audience testing, which is rarely a good sign. They gave him more funding than he needed to make changes, effectively forcing whatever pre-existing audience there was for “Shelby Oaks” to ask where the money went. Then they saddled the film with pull-quote posters claiming that the YouTuber had “reinvented” the found footage genre when Stuckmann… hadn’t.
A cautionary tale for 2025’s narrative maverick, this largely mediocre effort will be remembered as a less terrifying “Blair Witch” marred by the optics of an indie filmmaker who gave up too much control. Let’s hope Stuckmann takes next Halloween off to come back even stronger – on his own terms.
From Neon, “Shelby Oaks” is in theaters now.
