Director Chris Stuckmann and executive producer Mike Flanagan on how they met and made movie magic.

The story of Shelby Oaks: How Mike Flanagan teamed with a YouTube critic-turned-director for new horrors

Director Chris Stuckmann and executive producer Mike Flanagan on how they met and made movie magic.

By Nick Romano

Nick Romano is a senior editor at ** with 15 years of journalism experience covering entertainment. His work previously appeared in *Vanity Fair*, Vulture, IGN, and more.

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October 24, 2025 9:00 a.m. ET

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Camille Sullivan as Mia in 'Shelby Oaks'. Credit:

Chris Stuckmann, one of the most popular movie reviewers on YouTube, finds himself on the other side of the critical line. Having shared his snackable film critiques for close to two decades with an audience of 2.03 million subscribers, it's now his own cinematic work that's under the microscope.

*Shelby Oaks*, Stuckmann's professional directorial feature debut, anointed by horror auteur Mike Flanagan, will now be distributed by Neon in theaters this weekend. Rotten Tomatoes, which long kept Stuckmann relegated to the YouTube/influencer category before granting him "approved critic" status in the years since, currently holds a 73 percent "Fresh" rating.

Legacy media outlets largely didn't vibe with the work. RogertEbert.com, whose namesake co-founder was one of Stuckmann's personal inspirations coming up as a critic, deemed *Shelby Oaks* "a checklist of clichés." But for other press outlets — ones that, like Stuckmann, carved out an identity in the digital space and that regularly cover horror — more actively praised the effort. The Bloody Disgusting, Dread Central, and Collider crowds are more decidedly pro *Shelby Oaks* than they are con.

The Boston Heights-born Ohio native, 37, estimates he's "probably read a few hundred" of these reviews already. "I've talked to a lot of filmmakers about this," he tells **. "Unanimously, all my buddies have been like, 'You get bad, you get good. You make money, you don't make money. The idea is you did your best.' It's out there. That's a win. You got a film distributed in theaters by one of the best, if not *the* best, indie distributors on the globe, especially in this space where not having an IP is so detrimental."

Sarah Burn as Riley in 'Shelby Oaks'.

Mixing elements of found footage and traditional filmmaking, *Shelby Oaks* is the story of Mia Brennan (Camille Sullivan), a woman on a mission to find her sister, Riley (Sarah Durn), part of a famous group of YouTube paranormal investigators called the Paranormal Paranoids. Most of them died under mysterious circumstances years earlier, and Riley has been missing ever since, though newly surfaced evidence offers Mia new leads.

io9 refers to *Shelby Oaks* as "a horror film for and by the YouTube generation," which feels like an accurate summation. On Instagram, you can find evidence of the short films Stuckmann made as a teenager. *Indiana Jones* and *Star Wars* were frequent subjects. In one short, a young Stuckmann, dressed as Harrison Ford's lasso-whipping adventurer, jumps onto the back of a moving car. In another, he holds a plastic Han Solo blaster.

"He is a classicist. He is somebody who truly understands the history of the medium," Flanagan, who attached himself to *Shelby Oaks* as an executive producer, tells EW separately. "He's got an encyclopedic knowledge of genre filmmaking going all the way back to the silent era, but he is fully a product of that YouTube generation. I think it's represented really fascinatingly in his storytelling."

Kickstarting a career in horror

Chris Stuckmann at the Los Angeles premiere of 'Shelby Oaks'.

Stewart Cook/Neon via Getty

Stuckmann always saw himself as an aspiring filmmaker and not necessarily a critic. In a retrospective video released on YouTube for the 10th anniversary of his internet presence, he spoke about recording his very first cinema hot take at 21, back in 2009, sitting on a twin bed that was covered in *Dragon Ball Z* sheets.

He originally launched a "Quick Movie Reviews" YouTube channel for fun, long before the modern monetization of the internet platform turned influencers into millionaires and billionaires. His first YouTube paycheck was $130 for one month of posting a review a week of either a new movie out that weekend or a classic he wanted to talk about. It wouldn't be until about five years later that he earned enough to make this a career, and by then his audience had grown considerably, drawn to his bite-sized video reviews.

In that same 10th anniversary video, shared on his current Chris Stuckmann channel in 2019, he finally disclosed to his viewers, "I'm really trying to get a feature made."

"I enjoy talking about movies, but it was never really my dream," he tells EW. "It's that classic thing of, I'm a sculptor, but it turns out I'm also a pretty good car mechanic, and people like to pay me to fix their cars. That's really paying me, but I'd rather be a sculptor."

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The tattoos on Stuckmann's arms speak to the entertainment that shaped and sustained him. Arnold and Gerald of Nickelodeon's *Hey Arnold!*; Shenron of *Dragon Ball Z*; TOM, the animated host of the Toonami anime block on Cartoon Network from the 1990s; Motoko Kusanagi from *Ghost in the Shell*; the Cat Baron from Studio Ghibli's *Whisper of the Heart*; video game characters Star Fox and Link; and Faye and Spike from *Cowboy Bebop* can all be found.

The two most prominent adorn opposite shoulders. On his left is the cover art from R.L. Stine's *Goosebumps* book, *The Haunted Mask*; this children's horror series inspired Stuckmann to write. On the other side is a familiar crop circle from M. Night Shyamalan's *Signs*, the movie that made him want to direct.

They all fall within the same pop culture era, the mid-'90s to early '00s. "It was during a time in my life when I was either going to end my own life or survive," Stuckmann shares, speaking from his go-to at-home recording setup, sitting in front of his shelves of DVDs and Blu-rays — and one old-school Nintendo console. "The things that are on my body kept me going for a few years when I was a teenager. It was a very dark place because I was going through this realization that the religion I was raised in might not entirely be true."

Stuckmann remained open over the years with his YouTube audience about his upbringing as a Jehovah's Witness and leaving that life behind in his 20s. "When your whole way of life is this belief system, the moment that you have that crisis of faith or crisis of conscience, you're trying to figure out what the future looks like because your future is entirely built upon this thing," he adds.

Camille Sullivan as Mia in 'Shelby Oaks'.

*Shelby Oaks* does feature certain religious and cult elements. As Mia chases new leads in Riley's disappearance, she's reunited with an entity from their childhoods. Some of that personal extrapolation of his past was consciously infused into the story, while some, he says, was subconscious.

"When we were looking at the finished draft of the script and then into the shooting and editing, there was stuff in here that I didn't even realize," Stuckmann notes. "I was pulling from some of the darker places of my upbringing. The biggest thing I zeroed in on was this idea of this unseen force that feels like it's in control of your life and is potentially even guiding you in ways that you don't want to be guided, maybe even a little puppeteered. That was very much how I felt in that religion."

The ideas that would eventually evolve into *Shelby Oaks* have been kicking around ever since Stuckmann and his wife, Sam Liz, made a Halloween special in 2016 as part of a series of videos they shared annually on YouTube to mark spooky season. That year, the theme was "cabin in the woods." The couple often discussed making a feature film in the three years that followed. "We thought, 'We'll just self-finance this with our savings and put it on YouTube.' That was the initial idea," Stuckmann recalls.

Financing a film proved difficult. He ran into the same hurdles he faced as a critic. He'd often hear from potential backers, "We don't like YouTubers and TikTokers. They don't make movies." So after years of failed attempts, Stuckmann turned to Kickstarter. The initial ask was for $250,000. "I thought I could make a version of *Shelby Oaks* for that," he says. "It probably would've been considerably less shots, that's for sure. Instead of 20 days, we probably would've had something like 14 or 15, which would've been impossible."

Stuckmann never had to get too deep in the weeds with that potential reality, however. The fundraiser met the goal on the first day alone. It would then go on to gross $1.39 million, the highest ever for a horror film on the platform. The end credits of *Shelby Oaks* pay tribute to those 14,720 backers who made this movie a reality.

Joining the Flana-fam

Mike Flanagan on the set of 'The Life of Chuck' with Tom Hiddleston.

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Stuckmann's efforts struck Flanagan on a personal level. The filmmaker is now known as "*the* Mike Flanagan," a horror hit-maker behind a slew of Netflix series — from *The Haunting of Hill House* to *The Fall of the House of Usher* — as well as movies like *Doctor Sleep*, *Hush*, and *The Life of Chuck*. And he's now making a *Carrie* TV series for Amazon based on the Stephen King classic. But back in 2010, he, too, launched a Kickstarter to get a low-budget indie horror film, *Absentia*, off the ground.

"Kickstarter was still in its beta testing phase," Flanagan remembers. "It hadn't really caught on, and we didn't know what it was. It was just, we didn't know where else to get money, and this was a potential resource. We thought we really kind of rocked it because we tried to raise 15 grand, and we raised 25 grand. Chris was using Kickstarter on a whole other level."

Flanagan was a self-proclaimed fan of Stuckmann's YouTube channel as a fellow movie lover, but he reached out personally in a DM on Twitter in 2014 after the critic posted a review praising his film *Oculus*. Even now, Flanagan doesn't quite know what he was thinking. "*Oculus* was kind of my first real movie, so I hadn't yet separated those two thoughts in my head where you shouldn't maybe reach out to critics," he says.

For Stuckmann, "It was very much like, He's doing what I wanna do one day," he shares. "To talk to someone that made that leap was inspiring to me. It made the idea of being a filmmaker professionally a little more attainable all of a sudden."

The two maintained a correspondence over the years, but Stuckmann noticed it had turned into a real friendship when Flanagan messaged about *Before I Wake*, his 2016 horror that didn't get U.S. distribution until a couple of years later, when Netflix released it on streaming in 2018. Flanagan flagged to Stuckmann that it became available on Blu-ray in Canada. "It was like, 'So we're chatting about movie nerd stuff. This is fun,'" Stuckmann says.

The first time Flanagan heard about *Shelby Oaks* was as one of its Kickstarter backers. As a way to remember his own beginnings as a filmmaker, he anonymously supported various indie horror projects on the crowdfunding platform over the years. When Stuckmann's campaign broke a record, Flanagan reached out again with congratulations, a moment that would lead him to offer notes on the edit, sound mixing, sound design, score, and other aspects of postproduction.

"This was Chris Stuckmann's movie from start to finish," Flanagan says. "If I could remove a couple obstacles from his path or help him just navigate what it is to finish your first independent feature, which is a huge and terrifying and strange experience no matter how you go about it, that was really my goal."

"Honestly, I did need him," Stuckmann adds, "because he gave me that boost of confidence to stop waiting on this thing. It's the same when I had kids. I was very scared to become a dad because my relationship with my dad isn't very good, so I was afraid I wouldn't be good at it. I kept saying, 'When I'm ready...' My wife was like, 'What does that even mean to be ready?' Life is literally just a series of moments that are thrown at us that we have to then immediately figure out how to deal with. We're never really ready for things, so just do it."

It's not lost on Stuckmann that he's now following a career path similar to Flanagan's. He definitely has other ideas cooking. Stuckmann admittedly would love to make another horror film after *Shelby Oaks*, but he considers himself "very genre agnostic."

"I love action, I love thrillers. I have a drama that I wrote about Jehovah's Witnesses that I hope to make one day. It's kind of in the vein of a *Spotlight*," he says. "There's quite a bit of stuff going on behind closed doors there that people just don't know about. The amounts of prejudice that are built up in those Kingdom Halls, unbelievable. They're anti-everything, as you might expect. And the things they allow to happen, especially to children. I really want to make a film about that, but it's a tough sell."

It goes back to the challenge Stuckmann brought up earlier with *Shelby Oaks*, how this concept isn't based on an existing I.P. "There's nobody wearing capes, there's no monsters and aliens and ghosts in it," he continues. "It's a very straightforward drama. It's a chamber piece, so it could even be a play."

We wouldn't necessarily bet against Flanagan's protégé.**

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Source: “AOL Movies”