Even before anyone had seen a frame of Shelby Oaks, critic and YouTuber Chris Stuckmann‘s feature directorial debut, it became one of the most talked-about horror films in the last five years simply because of the sheer weight of support its concept garnered. Stuckmann’s efforts to crowdfund the film set Kickstarter records, early festival buzz was strong, drew backing from Mike Flanagan‘s Intrepid Pictures, and, after an acquisition by no less a genre titan than Neon, the director even got to go back and tweak the film with new footage. 

But what’s most interesting about Shelby Oaks is something baked into its premise, a compelling formalist exercise that allows the film to unfold like a creepy set of nesting dolls. The found footage elements of this story have been heavily emphasized in the film’s marketing – at the Fantastic Fest premiere in September, DVDs of raw DV footage from the story were passed out to attendees – but they are only part of the Shelby Oaks puzzle. Part found footage, part faux documentary, and part traditional narrative feature, Shelby Oaks sets out to strike a delicate balance that plays with three different well-worn horror cinema forms. 

It’s all enough to beg the question: How do you even begin to put all of this together?

That’s the task that fell to editors Patrick Lawrence and Brett W. Bachman, who worked closely with Stuckmann to assemble Shelby Oaks into the 90-minute thrill ride hitting theaters this month. Lawrence was on board well before the film ever played before a crowd, while Bachman joined the production after the Neon acquisition and helped Stuckmann to recut things in 2025, but both editors had to work with the same challenges, including hours of raw footage and the film’s effort to play in three cinematic sandboxes at once. 

“I remember Chris sharing a conversation he had had with a buddy where he was like, ‘I have this idea to do a fake documentary, but I don’t really know how far I can take it,'” Bachman told Bloody Disgusting. “‘Can I then go into single camera footage? Am I allowed to do that?’ And his buddy was like, ‘Yes, of course, you can do whatever you want! It’s your movie.’ This very much changes on a filmmaker-to-filmmaker basis, and I think with Chris, you’d have to talk to him about this, but I don’t know if he could foresee a version of Shelby that existed solely as a found-footage film or a faux-documentary.”

Shelby Oaks is the story of Mia Brennan (Camille Sullivan), whose sister, paranormal investigator Riley Brennan (Sarah Durn), went missing back in 2008 while filming an episode of her ghost hunting series, Paranormal Paranoids. It’s years later, and Mia is still not ready to give up on finding Riley, so when she comes into possession of a tape that promises more information on how exactly Riley went missing in the nearby Ohio ghost town of Shelby Oaks, she will stop at nothing to find the truth, even if it means walking into the same darkness that took her sister. 

We won’t go into all the spoilery details, but the film opens with a found footage peek into terror, then morphs into a faux-documentary about Riley’s disappearance, Mia’s search, and the online sleuthing community that sprang up around the mystery. From there, the film zooms out again to reveal the documentary is still in production, and becomes a traditional narrative feature – with elements of found footage and faux-doc recurring throughout – following Mia’s final search for Riley. Throw in the hours of Paranormal Paranoids footage Stuckmann had previously shot and already uploaded to YouTube, and Shelby Oaks became a towering task for any editor. 

“There’s a lot. The documentary, in script form, was 30 pages, and in the first cut, was probably closer to 40 minutes [of the movie],” Lawrence explained. “And there’s just a lot of information there, a lot of exposition that sets up Mia and her journey through the rest of the film. So it’s essentially the first act of the film. But there really had to be an examination of not being too precious about all that information.”

As the film came together, notes started to come in, and the temptation to cut down the documentary footage increased. But even with some tweaks to condense things, Stuckmann and Lawrence stuck to their guns on using the faux-documentary angle to set up much of the narrative tension in the film, before Mia heads out on her journey. When Bachman came aboard, it was no longer about condensing, but about enhancing. 

“The first 30 minutes were so strong, this documentary sequence was really eloquently prepared, and it just hooks you from a narrative perspective,” Bachman said. “I’d seen so much effort to compress the opening parts of this documentary scene,  and I remember thinking, ‘This is my first impression of the movie. You can really lean into this. You can actually let this thing breathe. You can really just firmly establish right off the bat the tone of this thing.‘ So my first act was actually to make the opening of the movie a little bit longer. Open that up, let that breathe, really set the tone and really ratchet up your sense of dread immediately.”

But the first act wasn’t the only major challenge when it came to the film’s hybrid nature. When Mia receives the tape, featured in the film’s trailers, which leads her to new clues about what happened to Riley, she has to actually sit down and watch the footage. This gives the viewer a scene in which Mia, in the narrative feature portion, is both finding and watching elements of the found footage portion. For the editors, it was all about showing enough of the raw found footage that viewers got the important clues, but not so much that it overshadowed Sullivan’s performance as a grieving sister looking for hope.

“That was the challenge because there is a whole, I don’t know, two-hour-long version of that tape,” Lawrence said. “So it was like, ‘How do we do this in a way where the audience doesn’t get bored with it, that they’re along for the ride and make it still feel like the tape is seamless?’ Obviously we had cuts and glitches and we had some of Mia’s reactions and stuff like that, but we still had to manipulate the tape to where it felt authentic and seamless, even though we were splicing and trying to speed up the journey as they’re going through Shelby Oaks, trying to speed up all that information.“

Stuckmann’s long track record as a critic and commentator, and with his public documentation of the making of Shelby Oaks, means that it’s not difficult to find the film’s influences. Whether it’s Lake Mungo or Noroi: The Curse or The Blair Witch Project, the film’s thematic and tonal touchstones are right there on its sleeve, but even with those in mind, the structure of Shelby Oaks also offered a chance to do something that felt fresh. For Lawrence and Bachman, working with Stuckmann on the film was a chance to work within a certain frame of reference in horror cinema history, but then forge ahead with their own take on familiar formats.

“When it came to the actual influence of the movie, some of these things that come up, whether it be Blair Witch or other influences, those weren’t really discussed [in the edit],” Lawrence said. “A lot of it was just us doing our own thing.”

Shelby Oaks is in theaters everywhere on October 24.