Exclusive: How CLOVERFIELD Inspired Chris Stuckmann’s SHELBY OAKS
Director Chris Stuckmann’s Shelby Oaks is one of the buzziest horror movies of the year. It’s been making the rounds at festivals as of late ahead of its fall premiere, recently playing at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas. You can read Fango’s review right here. The film cleverly plays with paranormal internet lore, with a fictional true crime mystery at the center of it all. It turns out, Stuckmann was inspired by one of the best viral marketing campaigns of all time in crafting his feature debut. Namely, Cloverfield.
See also: Matt Reeves Isn’t Opposed To Directing Another CLOVERFIELD Movie
Fango’s own Angel Melanson spoke with Stuckmann about Shelby Oaks at Fantastic Fest. During the conversation, she asked about the inspiration behind the Paranormal Paranoids, who play a key part in the film. Stuckmann released several videos from the Paranormal Paranoids online well in advance of the release of Shelby Oaks. These videos were not explicitly tied to the movie when they were released but actually play an integral part in it.
The filmmaker explained that it was the original, mysterious teaser trailer for Cloverfield that helped spark his imagination. That teaser, which you can check out above, notably didn’t even include the title of director Matt Reeves’ movie, which was produced by J.J. Abrams. It was all about building an intriguing mystery. Here’s what Stuckmann had to say about it:
“I saw Transformers in 2007 in the theater and I was look, cool movie, really fun. But there was a trailer for something called Cloverfield that played before that movie. It was just the Statue of Liberty head that fell out of the sky and landed on the streets of New York. Then, it cut to black. I remember in ‘07 being like, ‘What is that?!’ And going online, going to the old IMDB message boards, and searching through everything. There was already all of this stuff online.”
“There were like news reports from Japan about something that fell from the sky,” Stuckmann added. “It felt so unique and so cool to me that a film could do that. I thought, if we could do that even on a small scale. If we could seed these videos into the internet so that when the film did come out people would look and go, ‘Oh, this really was three four or five years ago.’”
Cloverfield would go on to become a big hit in 2008 in no small part to this augmented reality campaign, which capitalized on the early days of viral internet content. Abrams and Reeves would later pull a similar surprise with the release of 2016’s 10 Cloverfield Lane. Stuckmann was trying to capture some of that same spirit with the Paranormal Paranoids bit. It worked better than he anticipated.
“The funniest, craziest thing started happening,” Stuckmann explained. “When we first started doing these videos, we didn’t announce our names or any involvement of any kind, and I saw comments that were like, ‘Oh, I think I remember them.’ I was like, ‘No you fucking don’t. I made this up! This is fiction!’ But it actually kind of worked.”
As Stuckmann put it, they created their own IP, which they then in turn “acquired” the rights to, which all added to the mystique from the get-go. NEON later acquired the rights to the actual movie, which is due to hit theaters this fall, just in time for Halloween. It stars Camille Sullivan (Hunter Hunter), Brendan Sexton III (Russian Doll), Michael Beach (Deep Blue Sea 2), Robin Bartlett (Shutter Island) and Keith David (The Thing). The synopsis reads as follows:
“A woman’s obsessive search for her missing sister leads her into a terrifying mystery at the hands of an unknown evil.”
Shelby Oaks hits theaters on October 24. You can also check out our full interview from Fantastic Fest below.
