Knock on Wood

The pipeline from YouTuber to filmmaker has only become more prominent in the last few years, as directors like Bo Burnham and the Philippou brothers have gotten legitimate budgets to make art for both the big and small screen. But there’s no bigger success story than Chris Stuckmann, who began reviewing movies on YouTube in 2009. Now, he has successfully led the biggest horror movie crowd-funding endeavor in history. The difference 15 years can make!

Stuckmann’s debut feature is Shelby Oaks, derived from an initial concept from Stuckmann and his wife, Sam Liz. After years of lengthy development and the aforementioned Kickstarter campaign, it achieved the modern dream for an independent horror film: distribution from Neon (the company behind Longlegs and Parasite) and a new executive producer in Mike Flanagan, the accomplished horror filmmaker behind Doctor Sleep and The Life of Chuck.

If you hadn’t told me Shelby Oaks was produced for a shockingly low amount of money, I would never have been able to tell. It’s a confident, assured directorial debut, taking advantage of the production value it does have – real locations in Stuckmann’s native Ohio, including an abandoned prison, a derelict amusement park, and a picturesque suburban house. Stuckmann imbues a tangible atmosphere into every single one of these locations, utilizing every inch for maximum effect. No shadow or corner goes unused.

The film follows Mia Brennan (Camille Sullivan), who has been searching for her sister Riley Brennan (Sarah Durn) ever since her disappearance 12 years before near the fictional Midwest town of Shelby Oaks. When new information comes to light, Camille embarks on a journey alone to investigate the reappearance of a fantastical demon from her and Riley’s childhood.

The first twenty minutes does something you’ve seen before, but from a refreshingly honest place – time and time again in the post-2000s horror craze, we will be subjected to internet-focused and found-footage montages that set up the world and characters we will be following for the rest of the film, and it almost always feels forced and overly expository. Not so with Shelby Oaks. The film draws on Stuckmann’s experience as a pioneer in the incipient era of YouTube, taking us on a journey that not only contextualizes Riley’s history as a “paranormal investigator” in a sensationalized web series, but also charts just how much the internet has changed in the past two decades.

It’s also worth noting just how utterly creepy Shelby Oaks is. It oozes tension, and when you’re following Mia into a dark cell in the aforementioned abandoned prison, it builds and builds and builds until you’re scaring yourself just waiting for any sort of payoff. It’s a horror movie made by someone who has seen a lot of horror movies, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It doesn’t rely on jump scares, and instead chooses to edge the audience into oblivion, a tactic you don’t see nearly often enough.

All that being said, the film’s ultimate storyline (beyond Mia’s initial quest) has been fulfilled in a more satisfying way in movies past, but that’s not any sort of indictment on Stuckmann or the crew. They used every single resource they had, and their final product is entertaining as hell. The theatrical experience was laced with a unique tension, as if the whole audience was electrified by the lead-up to the next scare. Best of all, it feels both homespun and sophisticated – a hair-raising labor of love, brimming with exuberance and joy (despite delivering some truly horrific imagery). However you might feel about Chris Stuckmann as a film critic, he made a movie – a very hard thing to do – and he made a good one, an even harder thing to do. Consider me Stuckmannized.

Shelby Oaks opens in theaters nationwide on October 24.