Chris Stuckmann Was a Test Case — 3 (Painful) Lessons to Learn from Neon’s ‘Shelby Oaks’

“Shelby Oaks” is mid. Not good. Not bad. Just mid. That’s troubling news for studio Neon and even scarier for writer/director Chris Stuckmann, a YouTube film critic from Ohio who made the leap to feature filmmaking in Hollywood thanks to Mike Flanagan. Stuckmann’s directorial debut made history as Neon’s first-ever major release timed to 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.

Earning $2.35 million in its opening weekend, “Shelby Oaks” would already be a triumph if it had stayed the low-budget horror flick that debuted to critics at Fantasia Fest 2024. But when Neon bought the film just before its world premiere — and later injected roughly $1 million into reshoots that don’t improve the story much — Stuckmann’s scrappy underdog became a mainstream Frankenstein’s monster some horror fans earnestly wanted to watch fail.

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What happens to “Shelby Oaks” and Stuckmann’s career after this has big implications for the future of indie film, and it could say even more about headwinds facing the entertainment industry writ large. From the Hollywood heavyweights who brought you reigning Best Picture winner “Anora,” “Shelby Oaks” is a found footage film 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 movie. What went wrong?

High Subscriber Count < Quality Filmmaking

A24 used the millions of people who follow Danny and Michael Philippou on YouTube to turn “Talk to Me” (2022) and “Bring Her Back” (2025) into unprecedented success stories for the studio. The brothers’ first feature film was purchased out of Sundance — for an amount that’s not public but estimated somewhere in the low seven-figure range — and it made $91 million worldwide. That’s an outlier, but no doubt what Neon was hoping for with “Shelby Oaks.” Stuckmann has 2 million subscribers on YouTube today, while the Philippou brothers have 6.9 million under the account name RackaRacka.

Shudder looks back on its collaboration with famous TikTokers Kris Collins and Celina Meyers for “House on Eden” positively. The comparatively teeny 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 using many of the same lo-fi techniques that Stuckmann relied on for his movie, “House on Eden” is better in part because it wasn’t so obviously impacted by studio interference. Suffice to say, there are plenty of filmmakers playing the Bring Your Own Audience game in Hollywood these days — but digital notoriety won’t translate to mammoth ticket sales unless the film is seriously worth watching.

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 decent enough start, and the company ought to break even this weekend or next. When Neon sells the international rights, that could soften the blow on domestic performance, too. But the very first “Shelby Oaks” investors — Stuckmann’s OG supporters who crowdfunded over $1.3 million so he could make the film — are divided by the black box the production entered when Neon came on board.

Crowdfunding can make for exceptional word of mouth, but if you promise “unprecedented” access and transparency within the moviemaking system as Stuckmann did, then you have to deliver on that. Some stand by him. Others think he sold out. Either way, the damage has been done, and Stuckmann will be hard-pressed to find that kind of unbridled support online again. Go look at the “Shelby Oaks” Kickstarter page or the comments on his latest film reviews on YouTube for a taste.

There’s a Discord managed by producer Aaron Koontz where the biggest grassroots “Shelby Oaks” supporters were reportedly getting more updates than the rest of Stuckmann’s fanbase. But after speaking with IndieWire on the record over the summer, Koontz declined to provide further comment. The reshoots have even made some cinephiles question the honesty of their favorite critics. It doesn’t seem like much of an effort was made by Stuckmann’s team to encourage re-reviews of his film after it was significantly altered following Fantasia 2024. That’s an unimportant wrinkle on most reshoots, but a point of ire for 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 yearly Halloween release into the 21st century, but Stuckmann faced his own kind of reverse bear trap when he agreed to position the “Shelby Oaks” release around October 31. His was a title that arguably had too much pressure on it already. The premiere date for “Shelby Oaks” changed more times than you can reliably count, and the internet does not rest when it wants access to off-limits content. If you position your movie as a serious draw for horror lovers during their favorite season, then the final film you present has to be an event worth watching.

As Stuckmann’s mentor, Flanagan helped get his boy in the door. Close friends with top brass at Neon, who released his own film “The Life of Chuck” earlier this year, Flanagan may have also tripped Stuckmann up by getting the first-time feature filmmaker in bed with a studio that’s by now too big for this type of movie. What’s worse, Neon didn’t trust the product Stuckmann already made and put the movie 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 that money went. Then, they saddled the movie with posters featuring pull quotes that claimed the YouTuber had “reinvented” the found-footage genre when Stuckmann… hadn’t.

A cautionary tale for the 2025 storytelling maverick, this largely mediocre effort will be remembered as a less scary “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.