I’ve been a fan of YouTuber film critic Chris Stuckmann in some capacity, since I was in high school. I’ve lost track of his videos, found them again, lost track again, several times over. My own obsessive love for movies was validated by him early on, and if you’ve ever read one of my reviews, you’ll know even today that I can’t shut up about movies. And in 2021, Stuckmann announced he was finally putting his debut feature film together, a horror film called Shelby Oaks, and was doing a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter for it. I gave probably $50 to this endeavor at the time, not sure if anything would ever come of it, but enthusiastic to see if something did.

Cut to 2025, Shelby Oaks has screened at several genre film festivals like Fantasia and Fantastic Fest. The response has been positive, if not overwhelmingly so. Filmmaker Mike Flanagan, known for The Haunting of Hill House and Doctor Sleep, came on board as an executive producer on the project, after it was picked up by the very-hot-right-now indie studio NEON, and the film has been awarded a prime pre-Halloween release date. And having finally seen Shelby Oaks, Stuckmann’s passion for the horror genre can be felt throughout, and it’s a promising debut for a new voice in the horror genre. 

I was going to skip writing about Shelby Oaks entirely because I contributed to its Kickstarter campaign a few years ago. I felt like this may deal in some ethical gray areas I wasn’t comfortable with. But instead I wanted to just note this information at the beginning. Because while Shelby Oaks did ultimately work for me, it has some problems and we’re going to talk about them.

Riley Brennan (Sarah Durn) was involved in a popular paranormal investigation YouTube channel. Some time ago, she and her co-hosts went missing and were not heard from again, and were last seen in the ghost town of Shelby Oaks, Ohio. Her sister Mia (Camille Sullivan) is being interviewed for a documentary about the disappearance, as she has not given up the search for her sister. On the day shooting for the documentary is wrapping, she gets an alarming knock at the door. This leads her to evidence that could finally solve the mystery of what happened to Riley.

Shelby Oaks is never rewriting the rules of the horror genre, and it’s easy to see where Stuckmann found his inspiration. But as an exercise in structure, this is more creative than I would have thought. The beginning of this film is a mockumentary, with news footage and interviews detailing what happened to the missing person at the core of this story. And then after the first act, we take a turn into a more traditional narrative, in a different aspect ratio, with a completely different style. And that shift could feel jarring if the filmmaker did not know what they were doing, but it’s clear Chris Stuckmann has seen a million horror movies and has taken mental notes of what he’s wanted his own horror movie to look like. Shelby Oaks is never ripping off any one particular movie, but it also doesn’t feel like anything I haven’t seen before.

If there is one central reason to see this film, it’s the work Camille Sullivan is doing here. She’s a Canadian actress with many credits to her name, but I hadn’t seen her before. She’s outstanding here. This is definitely a more showy performance, but it works better in the more understated moments where Sullivan’s expressive face is telling you everything you need to know. I also enjoyed Norma Bartlett, who plays Norma, an old woman Mia visits while searching for details about Riley’s disappearance. Everybody else in the cast fails to make a strong impression, but this is absolutely more of a showcase for the work Camille Sullivan is doing, and the performance is strong enough to earn that. 

Like I was saying, the film is inventive structurally but I could see the shift the film takes after the first act being potentially polarizing for audiences. It worked for me but I could see why it may not for others. To me it felt like the story was at its strongest in that opening section, and that makes sense because that’s where everything is being set up. And when we get to the third act, the story takes some turns I wasn’t expecting, and I’m not sure they all worked for me. The ending also feels more than a bit rushed and unsatisfying. Without credits, Shelby Oaks runs just about 80 minutes, and I think we could have taken a little more time to flesh out the third act so the impact of those final moments could hit audiences a little harder. 

So, ultimately there’s a lot of promise in Chris Stuckmann’s vision as a horror filmmaker, and he’s clearly put everything he’s got into this. And not every beat works, but when it does, it works quite well. Stuckmann’s script could use some reworking and the pacing and payoff could be stronger, but these are issues that could be addressed and fixed if Stuckmann gets the opportunity to do this again. And judging by this film, I hope he does. Shelby Oaks is atmospheric, unpredictable, intense and effective as a piece of horror storytelling. There’s some wonky CGI and some clunky dialogue, and the third act falls apart a bit, but overall I was impressed with what Stuckmann manages to do with such limited resources.