A James Newton Howard score swells as the Hess family squares off for the final time against an extraterrestrial threat. Joaquin Phoenix pulls a baseball bat from the wall and takes a deep breath. When the bat comes straight toward the camera, a young Chris Stuckmann finally exhales. Moments earlier, his legs had been pulled onto his seat, his nose tucked between his knees, terrified by what he was seeing on the screen. In 2002, a fifteen-year-old boy realized that movies could transcend the frame and seep into the bones of those who watch them. He understood what his life would be about, and he figured it out at the movie theater during a showing of Signs.
Two decades later, Stuckmann still treats the theater as a kind of sanctuary, the glow of the projector like candlelight on the walls. To him, the movie theater is a place where sound, darkness, and collective breath merge into something sacred. It is also where horror feels most alive. Though Signs was the first film to open his eyes to the idea that you could tell a small story on a big scale, countless trips to the theater have brought him back to that exact moment. Movies like Insidious stayed under his skin long after the lights had come up. The theatrical experience has always offered Stuckmann more; his responses to the screen are amplified by the camaraderie of those around him. The option to pause the film or leave the darkness of a room is taken away when sitting in a cinema, and the heightened stakes are heard in quick gasps from the stranger beside him. There is no way to know what will happen while the film plays, what will cause an audience to wince or jump while their popcorn spills everywhere, but Chris repeats the same quiet gestures, as if superstition keeps the spell intact.
With an affinity for entering films blindly, Stuckmann has memorized exactly how long each chain’s trailers last. He steps into a screening just before the lights dim, but never after, and drifts toward the back rows where the noise of the audience fades and the view feels private. He is sometimes carrying popcorn and a Diet Dr. Pepper, never anything fruity, sometimes something wrapped in chocolate. Once seated, he will not move until the lights return. He still remembers the thrill of walking into Mr. Deeds alone, realizing he did not need anyone beside him, only the movie and the dark. Reserved seating has since given him the small comfort of knowing he will have a place to disappear for ninety minutes. Unlike his Revenge of the Sith ticket, which shows he arrived nearly an hour early to guarantee a seat, he now savors the quiet moment before the ritual begins. The last part of that ritual is preservation. The Revenge of the Sith stub sits in a binder with hundreds of others, mementos from his time at the movies when the lights faded and somewhere in the dark a dozen strangers inhaled at once. That shared breath, Stuckmann believes, is why horror endures.
No matter how strange or macabre a story a filmmaker chooses to tell, horror fans will always find their way to the dark. Stuckmann recalls the theatrical fever surrounding Paranormal Activity and The Blair Witch Project, those nights when fear felt like a communal possession. To him, horror in a theater is not simply a screening; it is an event. He praises directors like Mike Flanagan, James Wan, and Zach Cregger for understanding that the big screen is a canvas for terror and the access point into the audience’s fear. Horror is what keeps the lights on, yet even as horror keeps audiences coming back, the spaces that hold them have begun to falter. Stuckmann has watched solemnly as the state of movie theaters declines. He misses the feeling of reverence that used to hang in the dark, recalling how going to the movies once felt like witnessing the best possible version of a story, something he would never see or hear that way again. Still, he has not lost hope for what the cinema could be. In his mind, he begins to rebuild it. His theater would restore the sense of ceremony he misses. It would follow a phone-less code of conduct, with a “purist auditorium” where guests would surrender their devices to a lockbox before entering. There would be sensory-friendly screenings for those who need a gentler experience, ensuring that everyone can share in the magic. In the lobby, beneath the hum of marquee lights, an arcade filled with Indiana Jones and Mario pinball machines would greet each guest, a memory of the theaters he grew up loving.
After years spent in the audience, Stuckmann finally stepped behind the silver screen. Shelby Oaks, his feature debut, now on VOD, was his way of returning the favor to the theaters that shaped him and to the genre that kept him there. Though he wanted audiences to feel the same slow, collective chill that once pinned him to his seat during Signs, he would have been content if it simply went up on his YouTube page. Around the time the film premiered at Fantasia Film Festival, Neon became interested and gave Chris the confidence that his story could live on the big screen. Shot across Ohio on a modest budget, Shelby Oaks follows a haunted investigation into grief and belief. Stuckmann hoped it would leave viewers uneasy long after the credits rolled, the way The Mothman Prophecies once did for him. In theaters, that unease becomes shared, an invisible thread between filmmaker and audience, proof that the ritual still works.
To Stuckmann, the theater is more than a building. It is his safe haven and his church. It does not matter what is on the screen or how many people sit beside him; he finds peace below the glow of the silver screen. Somewhere in a darkened theater, a person sits with their legs pulled onto their seat, their nose tucked between their knees, terrified by what they are seeing in Stuckmann’s Shelby Oaks.
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