After landing a horror hit with Longlegs, its distributor sticks with the genre and acquires Kickstarter's most funded horror film ever
Hope you like paranormal investigations.
Longlegs is off to a very strong start at the box office, and now its distributor Neon is looking to YouTube for its next horror hit.
After a lot of potential overhyping prior to its release, Longlegs has opened with a very impressive $22.6 million at the box office, a really good opening for a film with a budget estimated to be under $10 million. Its distributor, Neon, is no stranger to the horror genre, and after Longlegs has done so well it looks like it will be hoping to pull that off again with Shelby Oaks, a documentary-found footage crossover film directed by Chris Stuckmann. If that name sounds familiar to you, that's because Stuckmann is actually best known for his career as a YouTube film critic, where he's amassed more than two million subscribers over the past decade or so.
Shelby Oaks was actually initially funded via Kickstarter in 2022, where it managed to raise almost $1.4 million dollars, despite only having a goal of $250,000. To this day, that makes it the most funded horror film on the fundraising site, and by quite a large margin too (the second highest funded raised around $400,000, a whole million less). As the Kickstarter page describes, Shelby Oaks is a horror film about "missing paranormal investigators (the paranormal paranoids), the dark legacy they uncovered, and the far-reaching effects their investigation has as Mia searches for her sister Riley, the lead paranormal investigator, 12 years later.
"As Mia uncovers new and disturbing leads related to Riley’s disappearance, she uncovers evidence of a hidden supernatural evil dating all the way back to her and Riley’s childhood."
The film doesn't currently have a release date, but it's set to make its world premiere at Fantasia Festival this Saturday. Midnight Mass and The Haunting of Hill House creator Mike Flanagan is also attached as executive producer, so all in some pretty big names attached to this indie project.