YouTube legend Chris Stuckmann is making his big screen debut this fall with the horror-mystery Shelby Oaks, and he took influence from other low-budget pioneers to get it done. Stuckmann is best known as a film critic, most notably for his YouTube series Quick Movie Reviews, but he has always been a filmmaker himself as well. After years of preparation and seeking funding, Stuckmann’s directorial debut will be released in theaters on October 3rd via Neon. He sat down with ComicBook at San Diego Comic-Con, revealing that the biggest influence on Shelby Oaks was an obscure 2008 horror film called Lake Mungo.
“I think, more than anything, there’s a film called Lake Mungo. It’s an Australian film directed by Joel Anderson,” Stuckmann explained. “It’s presented as a documentary. It’s fictional, but it’s one of the scariest movies I’ve ever seen in my life, because the performers are amazing. And even more interesting to me — the filmmaker just kind of stopped making movies after that, and disappeared from the public eye. It kind of also created this whole nuance to it. Like, ‘The guy who made this really scary movie, I can’t even talk to him. I don’t know where he is!’ It’s like, it’s so cool.”
Stuckmann promised that he doesn’t intend to drop into obscurity after his magnum opus is released — he hopes to make more movies in addition to his online content. As for Lake Mungo, it is mired in as much mystery as Stuckmann implied, but it’s beloved by critics and it has a die-hard cult following. The movie is streaming now on Prime Video and Tubi in the U.S., for those interested.
Earlier in the same interview, Stuckmann revealed another filmmaker with a do-it-yourself spirit he took inspiration from. Describing the production process, he said, “It was pretty lo-fi. We had a small crew, and we just got to locations, like, some of the locations in the movie are my friend’s backyard, and things like that. It was very much so the Kevin Smith school of filmmaking, like, ‘Hey, I work in a supermarket, so I’ll make a movie called Clerks.’”
“I know where a lot of these locations were, and getting into them and being able to shoot places where I had friends and could get in there for really cheap, and just trying to make the movie as best as I could… We were very much operating under the radar,” he said.
Shelby Oaks hits theaters on October 3rd. Lake Mungo is currently streaming on Tubi and Prime Video, while Clerks is only available to digitally rent or purchase on PVOD stores.
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