Chris Stuckmann’s Shelby Oaks adds Mike Flanagan

YouTube content creator and movie critic Chris Stuckmann has been working on a horror feature titled Shelby Oaks for some time now, following a 2022 Kickstarter campaign that raised $1.39M in under a month. Now, The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass (among other shows and movies) filmmaker Mike Flanagan is backing the project as work on it continues.

In a shocking turn of events, it was revealed a while back the movie would be based on the viral Paranormal Paranoids series uploaded to YouTube a few years back. The videos followed a group of paranormal investigators and focused on the character of Riley, who ominously disappeared in one of the last videos.

Though plenty of fan theories have been floating around regarding the authorship of the video series, all signs are now pointing to Stuckmann being directly or indirectly involved. If so, this would be quite the master movie. It will follow Mia (Camille Sullivan) as she searches for her sister Riley (Sarah Durn), the star of the unnerving videos. “As Mia’s obsession grows, she begins to suspect that the imaginary demon from Riley’s childhood might have been real,” the synopsis adds. The movie is said to mix the traditional and mockumentary film styles.

The project was written and directed by Stuckmann and is now said to be deep into post-production. Producers are Aaron B. Koontz, Ashleigh Snead, and Cameron Burns of Paper Street, as well as Stuckmann. After the surprising news, Mike Flanagan, Trevor Macy, and Melinda Nishioka of Intrepid Pictures have come aboard the movie as executive producers. While release plans, theatrical or otherwise, haven’t been discussed yet, things should be moving faster now for obvious reasons. The cast also includes Brendan Sexton III, Michael Beach, Robin Bartlett, and Halo legend Keith David.

Chris Stuckmann’s Shelby Oaks only marks the latest jump to mainstream horror from YouTube fame. Markiplier teamed up last year with David Szymanski to bring the hit indie game Iron Lung to live-action. Then there’s the spectacular success story of new sci-fi filmmaker Dan Trachtenberg, who many may remember from the Totally Rad Show and a killer Portal short film that led to him directing 10 Cloverfield Lane for Bad Robot and later Prey, the best Predator movie since the original, for 20th Century Studios.