Chris Stuckmann, the YouTube film critic with 1.9 million subscribers and 5 million monthly views, has been tapped by boutique production studio Paper Street Pictures to direct a horror movie titled Shelby Oaks.
Stuckmann recently signed with Hollywood-based management and production firm Gotham Group and has multiple horror scripts in the works, Deadline reports.
Shelby Oaks will chronicle a fictional paranormal investigative team known as ‘The Paranormal Paranoids’. That said, found footage videos online in recent months — including one that appeared to show the abduction of a member of the group, Riley — have caused many horror and alternate reality game (ARG) fans to wonder whether the team is real, per Deadline.
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“I had been looking for the right project to partner with Chris on for a while,” Paper Street CEO Aaron Koontz told the outlet in a statement, “and when I fell down the rabbit hole of this scary little story, quickly emerging right in Chris’ backyard of Ohio, with an intriguing and quickly growing YouTube element baked in, I knew we had to act fast on the perfect vehicle to launch Chris as a feature filmmaker.”
Koontz, Cameron Burns, and Ashleigh Snead will produce the film for Paper Street, the Austin-based genre studio behind The Pale Door, Scare Package and an upcoming Alicia Silverstone shark attack thriller called The Requin.
Stuckmann made headlines earlier this year after coming out as pansexual in a video titled How I Left the Jehovah’s Witnesses to Pursue Filmmaking, which discussed why he shut down his first channel for fear of disfellowship — a tenant in which ex-members of the church are cut off from friends and family who remain affiliated.
