Stepping Into the Shadows of the Forgotten Town
When Shelby Oaks arrived on the scene, it did so with the kind of whisper that gradually becomes a scream. Directed by Chris Stuckmann, a YouTube film-critic-turned-filmmaker, the film promised a new kind of horror: part found-footage mystery, part traditional supernatural thriller, and entirely invested in the idea of what it means when the light goes out in both a place and a person. The story revolves around a ghost town named Shelby Oaks where a YouTube paranormal investigation team vanished, and the sister who won’t accept what happened. But beyond the plot, this movie became an exercise in ambition, fandom, crowdfunding and creative wrestling behind the scenes.
A Story That Stretches the Tape
The narrative begins with the paranormal investigative group Paranormal Paranoids documenting an investigation in the abandoned town of Shelby Oaks, where team lead Riley Brennan (Sarah Durn) goes missing. Years later, her sister, Mia (Camille Sullivan), in haunted domestic spaces, prisons, and fun-parks, refuses to accept that Riley is gone. These tapes highlight Mia’s emotional shift and descent, unconformable and slippery with dread. The shift from online ghost-hunting tapes to the traditional narrative mode of Mia’s descent opens the narrative emotionally: her marriage under strain, her longing for closure, her suspicion that what Riley found wasn’t simply supernatural—it was deeply personal.
Mia’s arc is the emotional backbone. She begins as someone defined by absence—her sister missing, her life in a standstill, waiting for something to shift—and gradually becomes the force deciding to open the door everyone else wants to keep locked. On the other hand, Riley’s earlier footage contains trauma and curiosity, where the film capitalizes on that duality: what you search for may be what is searching for you. Shelby Oaks, a decaying town, metaphorically, a character of the film, reflects the emotional hollows of the sisters.
The Human Faces Behind the Fear
Camille Sullivan, a truly exceptional lead who had previously reserved most of her career for sustaining roles on television and in smaller movies, was given the chance to star in a feature film. For her, the part of a woman emotionally drained and fighting to bring her sister home meant embodying both hopelessness and tenaciousness. In interviews, Sullivan noted the lack of professional closure as something the character was grappling for, most likely something Sullivan was experiencing in her career. Sullivan truly congealed the character’s energy.
As Riley, the character meant to center the mystery, Sarah Durn also faced a difficult undertaking. Riley leaves, sure, but her absence also profoundly impacts everything. Durn’s performance in the found-footage segments of the film is powerful and gives Riley a kind of restless urgency that, the audience is likely to know, reflects Durn’s real life and her desire to take on roles that defy genre conventions. Their off-screen dynamic—the two actors discussing their roles in Q&As—fed the sense of sisterhood that the film profoundly relied on, a sisterhood absent on-screen and explored in the narratives of the film.
Chris Stuckmann represents an archetype in Hollywood that is seldom seen: the successful storyteller behind the camera. Stuckmann’s foray into the film industry was inspired by self-affirmation after the success of his YouTube video essays. Given his religious upbringing, years of film analysis, and an urge to create a story rather than critique one, Stuckmann’s life experiences contribute to his film in significant ways. Themes of absence, invisibility, and exclusion echo the more personal questions he has publicly grappled with.
Crowd Funding and Community Building
This movie’s production history is a case study in itself. For instance, the project was crowdfunded through the popular website Kickstarter, eventually raising more than $670,000, and dominating that category as the most funded horror movie. Stuckmann’s Kickstarter campaign offered behind-the-scenes content, including location photographs and “Day 1” posts from the filming location of Ohio, and as a result built a community of grassroots supporters. They felt legitimate emotional involvement in the story, which they helped finance through crowdfunding.
The fans began to piece together the abandoned prison setting and the found-footage, YouTube analysis, and investigation subplot. The varied teaser trailers leaned into emptiness, featuring an abandoned prison with a slowly moving, static, and night vision footage, hinting at “what someone didn’t see.” A combination of genre fatigue, excitement, and buzz created a unique moment of “can this be the next big indie horror?” Showing in 1,823 theatres, the $2.35 million the box office earned in the opening weekend showed that there was excitement around the film. With a reported budget of $1.4-2.8 million, the $2.35 million box office was meaningful, even if it was not groundbreaking.
Every production comes with its own set of unique challenges. Taking into account the film’s premiere at the festival, the distributors Neon spent an additional 1 million on reshoots. The increased budget allowed the team to expand on the blood and gore, and practical effects. Work on the film included long nights filled with messy setups as the team attempted to coordinate using real prosthetics. The team developed a level of fatigue that was compounded by the excitement of being able to dedicate real work and reshoots to the film as the first version was a skeleton and the reshoots added the muscle.
Locations in Ohio hosted fascinating places for the crew, such as old prisons, weather-beaten buildings, and components of abandoned amusement parks. The production team opted to shoot the opening sequence in chronological order to give the actors space to build a relational arc as they performed. That decision meant that Camille Sullivan and Sarah Durn spent long weekend nights filming in near-silence, walking empty corridors and building sisterhood through exhaustion and ambient dread. From backer videos, we learned that the director’s chair gifted to Stuckmann on day one represented the entire community’s belief in his journey. The team intended that as a testament to their faith in him. Stuckmann’s team carried out a number of creative experiments. He combined elements of a mockumentary with found-footage, and traditional narrative storytelling. While some audience members found this to be a jarring shift, the team defended their choice. They argued that this creative choice represented the way Mia’s search transitions from recorded evidence to lived trauma. Conversations in online discussion forums noted that the first twenty minutes of the film felt thrilling and original, but the film then veered into familiar tropes. It’s telling that the creators embraced that risk: switching styles mid-movie, asking the audience to move from voyeur to participant.
What the Release Meant—and What Listeners Saw
The movie was available on streaming platforms on October 24th, 2025, and the reviews started pouring in. Currently there is a 56% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Reviewers compliment the atmospheric build-up but criticize the final act and state the story is not very original. Audience reviews show a lot of disparate views. Many seem to like the first act, but dislike the final act. Others state the ambition was admirable, but the execution was lacking. One viewer in particular stated that if one enjoyed the first twenty minutes, they will love the rest, but the tonal shift in the movie may not work for everyone. Audience reviews show a lot of disparate views. Many seem to like the first act, but dislike the final act. Others state the ambition was admirable, but the execution was lacking
Box office performance is modest compared to other movies, but for an indie movie, it is impressive. The movie was made on a budget of a few million dollars and it made two million dollars on its opening weekend. This indicates that niche horror is able to be produced and still make a profit. This is a platform for Stuckmann and his team. They have entered the market place of genre filmmakers and now have studio support.
Reasons Why the Town Remains Haunting After It Gets Dark
While it may not reinvent the genre, Shelby Oaks is still a necessary story about belief and absence and what happens when we lose someone we care about—whether they go away physically, or emotionally. It is about the pursuit of footage and the recovery of memory; a ghost town and the sister it left behind; a YouTube critic turned director asking what it would look like if you filmed a descent into madness. For the actors, for the crew, for the early financiers, for the night-shift techs who worked until dawn adding fake blood, for the filmmakers, it is a statement more than a credit. For horror fans, the community silence is deafening, desperately echoing belief that this ghost town had a story worth being told.
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