1428 Elm:
So I saw Shelby Oaks last night, it's a phenomenal film. I just want to say first off, congratulations to you and the rest of the team.
Patrick:
Thank you.
1428 Elm:
Of course. So to start, are you a huge horror movie guy yourself?
Patrick:
Yeah, I think that I've always been sort of like connected with like the darker side of art, whether it's music or films, and you know, as a teenager, you know, I loved horror, I, you know, Texas Chainsaw Massacre is still like one of the scariest movies even now when I watch it. I feel like because it's like how real it is, you know, and, so there were movies like that. Scream had just come out like when I was like 12, so that was super influential, you had the Halloween movies and so those things really got me going. Then when I really started to get into the film it was more like David Fincher and like Fincher was, you got to understand, new at the time. Like it was still like, when I was in high school and deciding to get into becoming a filmmaker, it was right around the time where like Fight Club had just come out. So there were only a handful of venture films to like go off of and, so there was a big part of me that was like really influenced by Seven. So when it came to Shelby Oaks, that was a huge part of it was like I had always, when I, when I moved out to LA that was the type of thing I wanted to do. I wanted to make either dark, true crime movies or like, you know, something very like, you know, dark drama related or whatever, I imagine myself being a dramatic editor and then like what happened was I I ended up working on a lot of with a lot of comedic actors and writers and doing some comedies, and I had some comedies get into Sundance and so that just kind of snowballed into comedies, dark comedies. Dark comedies became horror comedies and then became horror movies.
1428 Elm:
I think that's the road map for a lot of people because it's like I was saying even while we were in the coffee shop, I was thinking about the composition of Shelby Oaks and thinking about the Jordan Peele quote, "The difference between comedy and horror is the music".
Patrick:
Sure. Yeah, they have very similar rhythms to that, and I think it's just as hard to make somebody laugh as it is to make them scared. And especially in a desensitized society that we're in, it's very hard to make a scary movie.
1428 Elm:
Absolutely and it's funny you mentioned Fincher that hadn't even crossed my mind, but Shelby Oaks is very Fincher-esque. It's got a lot of air to mystery to it then, you know, a lot of, other horror films might have these days. It doesn't show you all its cards, which is, I feel like has had a big hand in its marketing, which I really appreciate. So as far as editing a horror scene goes, there's so many scenes in this film that do such a good job building up dread. I feel like my heart didn't stop pounding the entire, entire film. So I'm wonder if you could expand a little bit upon like what it means to edit dread.
Patrick:
That's a great question because Chris came to the table with that, that he wanted the movie to feel like dread, and that's not a note you get often. I think it it came from knowing where the Mia characters going in the film, and knowing what the end goal is and how to build up to that and making sure that like every scene was earned and how and what she's picking up from her journey essentially. And if you know what the end goal is and what she's headed towards, the thing that I can't talk about, the thing that like is, is actually happening behind the scenes in the movie, then you sort of know like how to treat the things that are happening around her and how to manipulate the reactions, you know, you see it in the movie, which is like the reactions to the people who were around her and how they react to her. And that, that sort of like, is she crazy? Is she not crazy? Is she obsessed, you know, is she taking this too far? All of those things and, the dread sort of like builds up within that, I think, you know, I love tension. I love if I can afford it, to sit in shots for a very long time. Sometimes producers don't like that, directors are more like cool with it, but it's like, I like to like sit in the shop for an awkwardly amount of time and really make the audience wonder like, wait, "what the f**k's happening right now?" or catch them off guard, you know. So if you could change the rhythm in a scene, you could really catch them off guard and like that's where the jump scares really work and really get you.
1428 Elm:
I like how you mentioned staying on a shot for a long time because I feel like that's, at least to me, one of my favorite tropes and horror is really staying locked in on a shot. I think what comes to mind immediately is one of my favorite films of all time, The Strangers from Brian Bertino. The shot where Liv Tyler's in the kitchen and I just held on her and you slowly see a face come out from the shadows, something like that, and I noticed a little bit of that within Shelby Oaks. I can't really get into too much detail on certain scenes, but you do play with that sort of holding on a shot and waiting, at least for me, I was waiting for something to manifest in the background. So what was that like in the editing suite putting that together with Chris Stuckman and the team?
Patrick:
Chris has a lot of really great ideas, and there are things in this movie that I know her there and I don't think anybody else knows are there. And, it's gonna be really exciting over time to see if people can pick up on the things, but there are details hidden within a lot of things that are just like very face value in the movie or like whether in the documentary side, like there's detail within the articles. There's detail within the photos. There's all these things that are going on that it's like it's very hard to pick up on a first watch, and so there's a lot of those things that are like buried within it, What I and this kind of maybe goes back to the dread thing. There's a scene in the movie, one that I can't talk about, but there's a scene in the movie where like we create a bit of confusion by like eluding that someone is standing behind Mia.
1428 Elm:
Yeah, I know the scene you're talking about, it's a great scene.
Patrick:
The way that it's portrayed is that like there is somebody like physically behind her, and that was something that like that Chris and I landed on. We're looking at the footage and How quickly do you reveal the thing and then it was like, let's not, let's actually sit in it and let's make the audience like really go, "Oh sh**, there is somebody standing behind her" and that's what I love. It's like really when you look at that stuff, it's like you have the ability to like just cut to the thing, you know, and it's like, "Well, we don't need to do that, we can actually just draw this out".
1428 Elm:
There were plenty of moments in that theater where I did say, "Oh f**k, something is behind her or what is that person looking at?" because there's scenes where they're looking through footage, right? I don't know if I'm allowed to talk about this, but they're looking through like footage and they notice maybe something in the background of a window and it goes back to that scene from The Strangers where I remember watching that for the first time and not even it was there until maybe 30 seconds into the shot, and it makes me wonder "How long has that been there? Did that just come into frame? Has it been there the whole time?" and those types of moments in horror films, I absolutely adore. It's that uncertainty of how long has that been there and how long has it been watching me.
Patrick:
Exactly, yeah. There's a really great shot in the woods that there's something hiding in plain sight that even last night, I'm sitting there and I'm like, "I don't think anybody sees that".
1428 Elm:
You were talking about that, how there's so many things that are to be discovered because for me one of the best things a movie can be is rewatchable. If I can rewatch a movie 5, 10,15, 20 times over, and still notice something new each time, that's a sign of a great movie. You were talking about Chainsaw Massacre, that's my number one movie of all time. I'm actually doing a Chainsaw Massacre retrospective on my podcast right now. I'm going through all 9 movies. It's as painful as it sounds, but the first one is my favorite film of all time, and even rewatching that for the podcast I was noticing new things. So I'm excited to have the experience of Shelby Oaks as it gets a wider release and starts coming out in theaters.
Patrick:
I think it's gonna be a film that hopefully it finds an audience and that they find those things to obsess over, over time. My attraction to the film was, one thing I always wanted to do as a filmmaker, I wanted to make a… I don't want to call it a mockumentary, but like I wanted to make a fake documentary that felt 100% real but was not happening, and when I got the script for Shelby, it was there. I was like, "Oh, this is exactly the vibe that I was wanting to do with one of my own projects." and that idea that, you know, the phrasing that I love is, when you think about these found footage movies, it's like, at what point do they just put the camera down? Then what happens after that? Chris's conception of the cameras being them actually holding the cameras and then being aware of the cameras and then not knowing what's going on and like not being aware that they're being filmed. I thought that was such an interesting perspective and it combines the thing that I was wanting to do with a completely different fresh take on it. And, in the edit it was always like, "How do you How do you present this to people?" Like, at what point do you present it as a documentary or do you present it as a whole narrative? That's a difficult task. The people at Neon, I think, have come up with a really great marketing plan for it, which I'm obsessed with the "What happened to Riley Brennan", and I think it's such the right move, but it is difficult because it's like a good chunk of the movie is a documentary. So how do you, have an audience understand that like there's a switch at some point, you know?
1428 Elm:
Yeah, I would say that it does kind of break those found footage rules, but I mean, rules are meant to be broken, right? I do like how it goes from that opening sizzle reel, like very rough quick cut found footage, and then to have a documentary, and then we're in traditional narrative format following the protagonist, and it's funny that you mentioned not wanting to call it a mockumentary because I had that same thought. I walked out of the theater thinking "calling a mockumentary feels wrong"
Patrick:
Yeah, I don't know, like what do you? I mean like, Lake Mungo, which is the top influence of the movie, can you call that a mockumentary? I don't think you can. It feels like a real documentary. So yeah, I don't know, maybe this is creating a new subcategory of found footage films. I don't even want to call Shelby Oaks a found footage film, but maybe it is. Maybe there is now this thing where there's like Shelby Oaks and Lake Mungo and a few other films that fit into that subgenre now.
1428 Elm:
It's funny because I, I wrote a script in college that was like part found footage part traditional narrative, and I was having second thoughts about it. I was like, "Oh are people gonna hate this?" but now Shelby Oaks is making me way more hyped for the idea. So thank you Shelby Oaks for validating that idea I had in college. Now, let's talk a little bit about that opening. That is my favorite opening in a horror film all year, because it's so, and this is not a critique, it's very long. It reminded me a lot of another really great horror movie intro is Friday the 13th from 2009. It felt like a mini movie and then the title drops and I'm like, I wrote in my notes "That was the f**king opening?" I love that.
Patrick:
So, what do you consider the opening, the initial scene or the whole documentary portion?
1428 Elm:
When they start showing the credits.
Patrick:
Ok, great. Yeah, so I'll start with the opening. The opening was a choice because the paranormal Paranoids and all of that footage is readily available on YouTube. So there's the way the movie is presenting new information to the audience that is not already somewhere else because the original story of the Paranormal Paranoids which started on YouTube, and their episodes are available and all of those things, they were out there. So for me, starting the edit, it was, "Ok, this is stuff that people have already seen that they're familiar with". If you look at the wider audience, and people who aren't familiar with the story, they don't know about any of this stuff. Then there's the stuff that Mia finds out about in the movie that nobody has seen before. So we had all this material and it was about, "Ok, now how do we use that to kind of like recap the story in a way?". So we had the video, the video of Riley that is kind of all over the place. I mean, for a while there it was like the only footage that was being shown of the movie. And so there's a whole, you know, 4 or 5 minute long version of that and my initial take on it was we should show the events as they occurred so that way people watch it and like let people feel like they're in the room with her, you know? That had to then get kind of like shrunk down a little bit, but once it did it freed us up a little bit where we were like "Ok, instead of having to show all the information, we're just going to like the information's there. If people want to go find it, they can go find it, but now we'll just show like the important parts of what we need to do". So that initial scene is still sort of maintained in a way where you're still getting that feeling of like being in the room with her, somebody coming in, you know… it was like maintaining that tension of the inciting incident of what happened to her, where she went, how she disappeared. That originally had a much larger piece of the movie. There's a lot of exposition, a lot of detail in the things that build. What I loved about it was you were getting all the information of what you consider an act one of a movie. You were getting all of that information told to you through like a Netflix style documentary and then you're off and running with the rest of the movie and you've got all the information you need from this documentary side. So the tricky part was how much of this do we actually need to know because there were a lot of details, a lot of things that were building up, a lot of things that felt important at a time that then later on maybe weren't so important. And then you kind of strip back those elements more and more and more to the point where you realize, "Ok, actually, you know what? Just only having these select pieces are enough to move the audience forward into the narrative side of the movie and get them going". You Things about like Mia's relationship with police and things like that we had to examine and figure out like how she's operating compared to how the police are operating and what they're doing about the investigation and all those things like, are these things really important?
1428 Elm:
Yeah, I mean, I love the documentary aspect, and part of me is curious if we'll ever get like a director's cut or some extended version that has more of those doc scenes intact, but I do like how you said how Mia is playing versus how the police are handling it, I think that whole idea is expressed so well through that one scene of her when she gets she gets that crucial piece of evidence and how she makes that decision. I think that scene alone does all that work, even though I would love to see the documentary cut cause I just love, I love movies that don't break character from that. Like Late Night with the Devil or the Poughkeepsie tapes are both great found footage movies because they never break away from that documentary style. They feel entirely like I'm watching something happen in real time and it's really sad disturbing.
Patrick:
In terms of the actual credit sequence, I'm going to be sensitive about what happens during the credit sequence, but what I will say is that that, from an editing standpoint, we originally had a different way of approaching that scene. It went in a different order originally and I want to give credit to my assistant editor, Kyle Boberg, who was sitting in the room with Chris and I and said, "Hey, what if we start within the scene and then she flashes back to what happened instead of just starting with what happened?" and that was the first thing that unlocked the scene because they originally went in a different order. Then when we did that with it, it was like, "Oh sh**, OK, there's the start of it". The second part of this is Mike Flanagan, who sat in the room and watched that scene and said, "credit sequence".
1428 Elm:
Yeah, I was gonna ask about the evolution of this because I know it's been a long time in the making. I believe Chris Stockman said he's been working on this for 6 years, and I don't have a complete timeline of what was done when or what's been changed throughout the years, but I do know Mike Flanagan was a crucial piece of making this film what it was, so I'm glad you brought that up. I'd love to learn more about that.
Patrick:
Yeah, I'll say that this conversation occurred post RRR and so that was, so when that happened, when that conversation took place, because I remember how stoked I was when the credits for RRR come up. I was like, "Yes! All right, we're in this movie now". So Mike saying that, and it then gave that scene so much more purpose than like how it had been playing originally. Even last night, like sitting in a theater just in anticipation waiting for that that Mike Flanagan presents to pop up like, "Ok, now we're in this movie".
1428 Elm:
It gave me chills. I'm a huge Mike Flanagan fan. I've always been a big fan of his, I love his work, I love his films Life of Chuck is one of my favorite movies of the year right now, which is funny because I'm a total horror guy. So when he got involved in this, I already had a peaked interest then hearing him being involved, I knew something was cooking.
Patrick:
Equally for me, you know, being in the room with him. It's hard as an editor, you're constantly navigating different people, whether they're directors or producers, the way they operate, the way they give notes, you know, egos sometimes as well. You know, Mike was not only one of the coolest people I've ever sat in the room with. I mean, he literally invited Chris and I, into the room to watch the final cuts of Fall of the House of Usher, and it was Chris and I and Brett Bachman. We were all sitting there watching these cuts of a show that like wasn't coming out for another year and just be like, "Whoa" and then he was like, "All right, let's watch the movie." and he's like, he's like, "Patrick sit in my chair" and I'm like, "OK, Mike, I'm gonna sits Mike Flanagan's chair". But the thing that Mike did that I've taken away from this and I loved so much is that Mike never forced anything, never forced us to do anything. He never said, "You guys are dumb, don't do that". There was a point in the movie where I think we were maybe like 1 hour 50, the original kind of the film was 100 minutes, but there was a point where maybe we were around like 1 hour 50 or something like that and we didn't know where we were gonna pull another 10, 15, 20 minutes out of. Mike was sitting in the room and he was like, "Ok, you don't have to do this but what if you cut here and then cut all the way here and see what that looks like" and Chris and I were just like, "Ok, Mike Flanagan". We did it and we're just like, "Wow". He's so in tune that he's got this foresight, and also, just as the editor, when you're so in the trenches with the director, you guys are a shared brain and like what Chris wants is also what I want and you also become very precious about things that maybe don't necessarily have to be precious. But Mike wasn't any of that, Mike wasn't precious to any of those things. So he could look at a whole 57 minute chunk of the movie and say, "I don't think you need that", but he would always say, "You don't have to do this. It's your movie". I love that because I've been on the side of so many mandates or notes that, they give you the note and then you're like, "Yeah, I don't know if that's a great idea" and then they're like, "No, you need to do that." and it was not like that at all. It was such a cool, fun, collaborative experience to like go through that.
1428 Elm:
I'm glad it's Neon that's been handling because Neon has had a really good few years as of late because again I I the marketing for Shelby Oaks, it's been very reminiscent of Longlegs last year. It's just got a mystery angle and I think it's gonna surprise a lot of people.
Patrick:
Me too.
1428 Elm:
I've started swearing off trailers for the most part. I cheat occasionally, I've seen the Black Phone 2 trailer like 5 times by now because I, I'm so hyped for Black Phone 2, but for the most part, I tend to stay away from them. I didn't even watch the trailer for Shelby Oaks because I wanted to go in as blind because I had a strong feeling I'd get a ticket for Fantastic Fest, and I was like, "If I go into it, if I do get a ticket, I want to be as blind as possible". I want to see it as new and just uninfluenced as possible. I just know Chris Stuckman, I know his review work and I know he's a horror guy. I know Flanagan is attached to it. That was all I knew going in and of course the poster art because I've been seeing them at my local cinemas. I've been getting more and more giddy by the day building up to it, but I just love the air of mystery this film exudes.
Patrick:
Shout out to whoever did the trailer. I don't I don't know who was in charge of that, but the trailer is fantastic.
1428 Elm:
I did kind of lie just now. I remember it played before Together before it was released online. I was like "I'm not gonna watch it online like on Twitter or YouTube, but I do kind of want to see the sneak peek at the theater". I don't remember too much of it thankfully because I had a fresh experience, but I remember the feeling. Which is like what trailers should do, they should leave you with a feeling.
Patrick:
Well, that's the thing. It's like we always thought that the tricky thing was how do you promote the movie with the two genres of storytelling going on in it and, I think that they have found a way to take the narrative side of it, which is the meat of the movie, and then incorporate the doc side of it as sort of like a mixed media aspect of the film. It's very non-traditional. You know, sometimes with audiences, if it's something that they're not used to, they, they sort of go, "Oh, I don't want that", you know? So, it is gonna take some getting used to, but I hope that at the end there are people that walk away from it and appreciate that they got something different out of it.
1428 Elm:
That's what I was gonna ask how do you think movie goers and especially horror fans are gonna take to Shelby Oaks?
Patrick:
I mean, I'm a guy that likes to see something new, In a Violent Nature was that way for me. I knew nothing about that movie going into it and then I sat there and watched this movie that felt like it was told from the perspective of Friday the 13th, the video game. I was like, "F**k yes", you know? I told everybody to go see that movie because I just love fresh takes on things, like, you know, fresh perspectives. I told Chris for so long that like this was one that people don't know what they're getting from this and you just got to stay the course because there are gonna be people that tell you, "Don't do that, stay the course, get in your lane," all of those things, and good filmmakers do that thing where they take chances and they try new things and they try new perspectives and new ways of presenting information. Chris had that movie in his head and it was all about "Just do that".
1428 Elm:
Yeah, which is like I said earlier, the shifting from a documentary found footage to traditional narrative, that's kind of breaking a rule of like found footage horror, but it works so well in this one.
Patrick:
On the festival side, for film festivals a lot of times they puts into boxes. They don't know how to do it, you know? So they look at a movie like this and say it's found footage, but it's only 15% of the a movie.
1428 Elm:
Yeah. Like, it would be weird to put this next to something like V/H/S. I'm a big V/H/S fan, I saw V/H/S/Halloween the same night I saw Shelby Oaks it was a blast, but calling them both found footage feels weird. Horror is a diverse genre and it's got a lot of diverse subgenres, but this one is so starkly different from so many other found footage and found footage adjacent horror films, but I think it worked out for the best.
Patrick:
I agree.
1428 Elm:
Like you, I'm a guy who likes to see something new. I loved In a Violent Nature and I loved Skinamarink,
Patrick:
And that's a movie that's very polarizing because it's told in such an untraditional way that you have to really buy into the weirdness of that going on in that movie.
1428 Elm:
It breaks a lot of rules and it doesn't play a lot of rules, it's very different from anything else I've seen. I think that's why I liked it. It's a primal sense of fear, you're down to your bare senses, sight and sound and even that's very dim and muffled.
Patrick:
It's tapping into that childhood imagination when you're alone at night underneath your covers you're wondering what every sound is.
1428 Elm:
I've always described it as like a visual representation of what it's like to be eight years old waking up from a fever at midnight. Your parents are asleep, you don't know what's going on, your head hasn't quite caught up, but it's like that for an hour and it's horrifying.
Patrick:
Well, speaking about genre, I think the thing that I took away much later on with Shelby was that I wanted to do true crime movies or do something that was Fincher-esque. And at the heart of the movie, it's a story about this woman's obsession with finding her sister. It's a true crime movie. So it's a documentary, it's a true crime movie, it's horror, it's found footage. It's a lot of things, it's crossing a lot of genres.
1428 Elm:
It's all great things because when a movie, I mentioned The Poughkeepsie Tapes earlier, which I know to some is a bit more of a controversial pick, but that is one of my favorite movies because it's It feels so unapologetically real. It feels like a true crime documentary. I remember the first time I watched it I was so entranced I forgot I was watching a movie. I went and tried to look up the case on my phone halfway through and I was like, "Oh, this is fictional". I forgot it was fictional for a minute.
Patrick:
Well, when I was approached with this paranormal paranoids thing, I was like, "I gotta learn all about this." and there were people who had done these YouTube exposes on the paranormal paranoids, and I watched all of them in preparation for talking with Chris for the first time as if it were a real thing.
1428 Elm:
That's so cool. I do want to ask to kind of wrap up, again, this movie has been such a long time coming. I want to ask, at what stage did you get involved with the film. You talked a little bit about how the film has evolved over the years and what's changed and what's not, but at what point were you brought into the fold and how different is it from that point to now?
Patrick:
Yeah, so they shot the movie in April or May of 22, and then they gave Chris the footage, and I think you heard Chris say last night he did an assembly cut of the film, and Chris is a spectacular editor in his own right. So, I was doing a movie called Blood Relatives for Paper Street Pictures, and there was a lot of hype around Shelby Oaks because it had raised $1.4 million on Kickstarter. So I was aware of it and when I heard that Keith David had been cast, like, The Thing and They Live are in my top 20 movies of all time. So I was messaging Aaron Koontz saying, "Hey, Keith David, you know that would be fun".
1428 Elm:
Keith David's in everything. Every time I turn around, I see him and I'm like, "I love that guy". I even put it in my notes when I watched the film, I wrote "Keith David? Hell yeah".
Patrick:
So I was planting the seeds and trying to get in there and then sure enough the call came and, they were a little slow going about it, but they were talking to me about it and it was a very short window of time of them to get me the script. I read the script, watched the paranoid stuff, and then had a call with Chris I think all in the same day. It was a real quick thing where I had a call with Chris at 4 and I had to read the script and do all this stuff all before talking to him. Then I got on the phone with Chris, and, you know for me it I felt like it was kind of kismet because like Chris is somebody who, you have that iconic image of him with his blu-rays and his collection behind him and his action figures and stuff, and it's like you've seen that. He gets on the call with me and boom, there's his stuff behind him. And that immediately starts a conversation cause, you know, I'm a nerd about certain things, he's a nerd about certain things and so we immediately took to talking about those things and where we can connect on and really hit it off, and I'm super fortunate that he took me on to do the project and that he trusted me with it. So I did my normal thing, which is like, "OK, now it's time for me to do my first pass of the movie" and what I didn't know was that Chris had had his first pass of the movie as well. But, it was great because there were things that like I necessarily didn't hit on right away that he had figured out and there were things that he didn't know how things were going to do that like, I did figure out. So, it was really great for him to like see my version of the movie and how there was a lot of stuff that like was very similar, but basically it was where he saw my version of the movie and then we kind of came together on like, well, here's this thing that Chris did that actually worked really well and then here's these things that I did that worked really well and so he was a big part of the initial edit too. So my involvement was all the way through the finished portion of the movie, until Neon came on and then we were very fortunate. They brought in Brett Bachman, who Brett was also involved in those days in the studio with Mike. Brett came in, did some tweaking to it, and really brought the cut home of what you see now. So, that's kind of the entire journey of the film.
1428 Elm:
Well, Thank you so much again for taking the time to chat with me. I'm excited to rewatch the movie because again, I love rewatch-ability and I know there's more secrets beneath Shelby Oaks. Forget the theater, I'm already ready for the Blu-ray so I could frame by frame analyze it.
Patrick:
Hell yeah.
Shelby Oaks will be released in theaters October 24th, 2025.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. If you enjoyed this interview consider following me on my social media pages such as my Twitter (@JacobAtTheMovies), my Instagram (@JacobTheHarper), my Facebook (@TheJacobHarper) and my Letterboxd (@JacobTheHarper).