Interview With Filmmaker Chris Stuckmann For ‘Shelby Oaks’

Something that stood out to me about Shelby Oaks, the new horror film written by YouTuber Chris Stuckmann and his wife, Sam Liz, and directed by Chris, is that before it was picked up by Neon, it was made entirely by money raised by crowdfunding in one of the most successful campaigns I’ve ever seen. They raised almost $1.4 million from 14,000 backers in ONE MONTH! Well, color me impressed. After seeing the trailer several times at the movie theater, Shelby Oaks quickly became one of my most anticipated movies of 2025 and I am so excited that it did not disappoint.

A woman’s desperate search for her long-lost sister falls into obsession upon realizing that the imaginary demon from their childhood may have been real.

To celebrate the release of the film, I chatted with Chris about brainstorming with his wife, crafting the crowdfunding campaign, horror movies, and more!

PopHorror: I really enjoyed Shelby Oaks. It was one of my most anticipated movies this year so I’m super excited to talk to you about it today.

Chris Stuckmann: Thank you, Tiffany.

PopHorror: What sparked the idea for the story?

Chris Stuckmann: My wife and I, we used to do a lot of YouTube sketches on my channel back in the day where we would just make fun horror sketches around Halloween and we did this one that was in a cabin in the woods. It was our fourth annual Halloween special. You can go back and watch it now where we went to a cabin in the woods to talk about cabin in the woods movies. We had so much shooting it that on the drive home, we talked about how we were both really tired of waiting to make stuff, let’s just make something and we’ll put it on YouTube, and just call it a day. That was the initial idea. Let’s make something that we can do ourselves without asking for permission from anybody. We started writing it together, and talking about it and brainstorming, staying up to 4-5am every night and just talking about the ideas, and it got bigger and bigger and bigger until it became something that clearly, we needed help to make it. It was like we started with this idea of like, “We’ll just do it ourselves!” and then it became bigger and we needed to find the more traditional routes again and look for help. That’s kind of how it started.

PopHorror: That sounds like something I would do is go out to a cabin and watch cabin in the woods movies. We once spent Friday the 13th at a cabin and watched Friday the 13th movies. We went and stayed where Fire in the Sky took place over Halloween, so we watched Fire in the Sky.

Chris Stuckmann: The scariest UFO abduction scene I’ve ever seen in a movie.

PopHorror: Yes! It’s terrifying. What’s also terrifying is in your movie, when Riley’s in the cabin and they’re she’s watching the video, and you can hear sounds like sound like coyotes feeding, that we hear that a lot here in Arizona, even in my own backyard, and now I’m going to be thinking about this every time I hear that. So, thank you for that.

Chris Stuckmann: Oh man, that’s cool. I get it here in Ohio too. There’s a pack of coyotes that I hear occasionally at night. We sit on our back deck a lot at night and that’s where I do a lot of writing. I’ll hear them out there and they sound ravenous and it’s a very terrifying sound and that’s kind of where some of those initial ideas came from, was just hearing them way in the distance and being like, what is going on over there? What are they killing? What are they eating?

PopHorror: It sounds like a party.

Chris Stuckmann: Yeah!

PopHorror: When I first came out here, I grew up in Ohio too and had never heard that before. At first, I thought it was a party, and then I learned that it was coyotes feeding.

Chris Stuckmann: Yeah, yeah, that’s right.

PopHorror: This was a project where you raised the funds to make it on Kickstarter. What pressures did you face with this being a crowdfunded film?

Chris Stuckmann: I think for me, first and foremost, I really was uncomfortable asking my subscribers for anything. I never had before and I just didn’t want to do that, I guess, until we stumbled across the idea of let’s make this crowdfunding campaign, invite them into the process of making the movie from the ground up, and make it genuinely a reward for them and something that can be very insightful and fun for them. So,we had a BTS person on set with us every day filming us and we would release videos of the film, behind the scenes, every single week during production for Kickstarter backers. The idea was this is something you normally get on a really good Blu-ray and you’re getting it now, before the movie’s even done, and a lot of people have come up to me, backers in person, who have said that it was like a mini film school for them. They were able to actually see what it’s like to make an indie film without a safety net, not knowing if you have a distributor and just getting as much as you can out of a limited budget. As soon as I realized that it would be the type of the thing that I would actually be excited about donating to, then I realized that wait a second, maybe we can do this. Then it was about, can we fulfill all of the rewards properly? That to me is the thing that usually is tough for Kickstarter campaigns later down the road. Hey, we’ve got a lot of stuff to give people and we want to fulfill our promises and make sure that all of that is kept safe and that everybody gets exactly what they need. Because of that, I just wanted to make sure all that happened and that everybody was getting everything they needed and that people knew they were loved and cared for. Neon’s been amazing with that, making sure everything is done properly. Posters and signing and DVDs and Blu-rays and all these backer screenings we’ve been doing. It’s been very important that they’re valued.

PopHorror: You ended up with over 14,000 backers and over $1,000,000! You did something right.

Chris Stuckmann: It was mind-blowing! It was mind-blowing, yeah. Our first initial goal was $250,000 and we did that in a day. From then on, it was just like, okay, the floodgates have opened! This is crazy!

PopHorror: Once it was picked up by Neon, you had to do some reshoots.

Chris Stuckmann: I can just tell you what happened. We had the movie done. We used all of our money. We did everything we could, and we were proud of the movie. When Neon bought it, they asked for a copy of my original script. They read it, and they reached out to me and they were like, “There’s a couple things in your script that are really cool, that are not in your movie. Why is that?” The answer was time and money, and they offered a little more. I got to go back in and do things that I always wanted to be in this movie, that up until then had been wish list elements that our indie production initially could not have afforded. It was a dream come true to be able to go in and be like, these things that I always wanted to be there, are there now. It’s not a privilege that many filmmakers get. The term “reshoots” often comes with a negative connotation, but pretty much every major film has reshoots, they’re just rarely reported on. It’s the type of thing where I was able to go in and actually add things that I always wanted to be there. It was so good to be able to do that. It was a real privilege.

PopHorror: That’s so cool! They were interested and wanted your vision, that’s so super awesome.

Chris Stuckmann: Yeah, it was amazing.

PopHorror: I have just one last question for you today. What is your favorite scary movie?

Chris Stuckmann: I wish you’d asked it like Ghostface! Let’s see… I would say The Shining and The Thing are the two that have always been so, oh my god, they’re perfect. Most influential, definitely Signs. As a kid, seeing that and realizing that I wanted to make movies when I was 14. That’s the movie that made me want to make movies. It’s always the one that has stayed with me and whenever I feel like I have writer’s block or something, I’ll pop on an interview with M. Night Shyamalan and just listen to him talk about his process and it makes me excited again about it. He’s been a massive inspiration to me.

Thank you so much to Chris for taking the time to chat with us. Shelby Oaks is in theaters now!