Camille Sullivan on ‘Shelby Oaks’, horror, and her past, present, and future as an actor
A YouTuber writing and directing a movie that was largely funded through Kickstarter is enough to raise eyebrows among cinema’s purists, but Chris Stuckmann’s ambitious feature debut, Shelby Oaks, definitely feels like the work of someone who rose to online prominence through their knowledge and love of film.
Combining elements of found footage, true crime documentary, conspiratorial mystery, and all-out demonic terror, Camille Sullivan’s Mia Brennan continues the search for her missing sister, Sarah Durn’s Riley, years after everyone else has abandoned hope and presumed that she died along with the rest of her internet-famous paranormal investigators, the Paranormal Paranoids, who were either killed or vanished while investigating the titular town.
Shelby Oaks began shooting in May 2022, and after a lengthy post-production process held up by the SAG-AFTRA strike and additional reshoots, it finally landed on the big screen in the United States on October 24th, 2025, and will be released in the United Kingdom one week later. For Sullivan, reaching the finish line is a relief.
“Oh my god, it feels so good,” she told Far Out. “There was a while there last year where I was starting to think it was a prank. I was just like, ‘Oh, yeah, sure, it’s coming out at some point.’ It just went on for such a long period of time, but it feels great. I’m so happy for people to see it. I think the extra time and the minimal amount of reshoots we did made a big impact on the finished film, and I’m thrilled for it to be out there and to share it with people. Finally!”
Speaking of those reshoots, with almost three years having passed since she’d played Mia, Sullivan didn’t seamlessly slip back into the character’s mindset after leaving her behind. “When I got the call, I was at first like, ‘I’ve really put that to bed,'” she admitted. “But I keep my scripts. So I went back and I found my script, and I take a lot of notes. So I went through my notes, and I remembered where I was, and then it started. And I use music as well, so I did all that to remind my brain where I was. And then, when I got to set it did come back pretty easily.”
“Too much a little bit, because it’s such a dark place that part of me was reluctant to go back,” she added. “But then once I was there, I was like, ‘Oh yeah, this is awful.'” The reshoots weren’t expansive or all-encompassing, but because production company Neon was so impressed with Shelby Oaks, the outfit effectively doubled the $1.4million that Stuckmann had initially raised through Kickstarter to add more gore and polish.
Debuting a new and original horror movie a week before Halloween is about as bulletproof a release strategy as anyone in the industry can find, and while Sullivan hopes that horror fans will show up because “they have so much passion for the movies” and the genre, she didn’t even realise that Shelby Oaks had another trick up its sleeve.
“Also, Chris is so well-loved,” she offered. “I mean, he’s beloved. I had no idea when I signed on to this project how much people respected and loved him. So the outpouring of goodwill for him and people wanting him to succeed is really giving this movie a lot of juice, I think.” As for how she was cast as Mia in the first place, Sullivan has Stuckmann’s YouTube channel to thank.
He was one of the biggest supporters of her leading role in the 2020 horror thriller, Hunter Hunter, celebrating it as one of the year’s best movies and praising her performance, which led directly to Shelby Oaks. “That’s exactly why I got it,” the actor confirmed. “He told me that when he watched Hunter Hunter, he immediately phoned or texted one of the producers, Aaron Koontz, and said, ‘This is her. This is Mia. This is who I want.’ It was all from that movie.”
It’s hardly Sullivan’s first brush with horror, after the aforementioned Hunter Hunter and other films like Geoff Redknap’s The Unseen and the Val Kilmer-led The Traveler, but what immediately jumped out when she read Stuckmann’s script was that, as much supernatural shenanigans are afoot, it’s a sibling story at its core.
“What really struck me about it was the relationship between the two sisters,” she detailed. “I thought, horror’s so great in that you get the fun of it and you get the scares, and you get all that stuff, but then at the same time, you’re dealing with these heavy, universal truths and emotions and relationships. So I thought it did a really good job of building that love and that relationship and that loss and describing it in a way that was fun and scary and a mystery as well.”
Even though Shelby Oaks is being distributed, and was given a cash injection, by the outfit behind Academy Award winners like Parasite, Anora, and I, Tonya, and recent box office hits like Longlegs and The Monkey, its origins on Kickstarter, Stuckmann revealing he ran out of money at one stage, shooting locations falling through, and most of the shoot unfolding in real locations gave it what Sullivan called “a bit of a guerrilla feeling,” but nothing close to what she’s experienced before.
“I mean, I’ve done a lot of I’ve done movies with much, much lower budgets, so I’ve really done where you’re just stealing, you’re just jumping out of a car and shooting as fast as you can, and then getting back in the car and getting out of there,” she reflected. “So it wasn’t like that, you know, they were very well set up. The producers were super well organised.”
“But at the same time, there is a limited amount of time, so you’ve got to get it done, and you’ve got to get it done quickly, and then move on,” Sullivan continued. “And that’s one of the things, when you have that, it’s the ability not to just go, ‘OK, that’s good. Let’s keep going. Let’s keep moving, and let’s just trust that what we’ve done is going to be OK.’ So there was some of that, you know.”
One of the most important backdrops in Shelby Oaks comes during Mia’s scenes in an abandoned and derelict prison, filmed at the Ohio State Reformatory. Or, as everyone knows it best, the prison from The Shawshank Redemption, and the irony of shooting a spine-chilling horror movie in the same place as one of the most beloved movies ever made wasn’t lost on the star.
“It was super creepy inside. It was really cool. They do tours now in there, I think, and then sometimes overnights and stuff. But part of it is really decrepit. You can’t go because it’s just not safe. But they had big cardboard cut-outs in there of the guys, the actors from The Shawshank Redemption! I have a picture somewhere.”
Camille Sullivan
Shelby Oaks begins as a found footage film, replaying Riley and the Paranormal Paranoids’ misadventures in spooky places, before it shifts to a talking head-style documentary about her disappearance. Before the first act is over, it pivots again to a conventional narrative feature, which, thanks to the way the production was scheduled, didn’t scramble Sullivan’s performative brains by constantly making her shift from one acting style to another.
The movie was shot “for the most part” in chronological order, with her documentary scenes captured on the first day. That also aided her performance, because “when the narrative shifts, it also shifts for me as a character.” With Mia having spent so long “stuck in this place, searching with no hope and no clues,” an early shock on her doorstep forces her to “meet the moment, regardless of what it is.”
Embracing one of horror’s former fads and the modern viewer’s current obsession with true crime, all while telling a story about fractured families, things going bump in the night, and the potential presence of otherworldly forces being responsible for everything to befall the Brennan family, places Shelby Oaks in the unique middle ground between postmodern horror and classic horror, and Sullivan didn’t want to become trapped on either side of the divide.
“I tried as much as I could not to reference anything while I was preparing it for that reason,” the actor agreed. “I don’t want to get trapped in something. There are so many great performances out there, like, you know, Ellen Burstyn in The Exorcist, and it’s like, I don’t want to get trapped in making choices, because I have a fondness for that. So I tried to just look at it as straight, straight, straight drama. Just make it as truthful as possible, and then go from there. And then you can allow the sets and the shots and the way that everything goes out to inform the style once you’re actually shooting it.”
Along similar lines, Shelby Oaks is a family drama, a mystery thriller, a supernatural horror, and a critique of the true crime obsession all at once, often in the space of the same scene. Again, Sullivan refused to be beholden to one aspect of the story, instead using Mia’s ever-evolving motivations to dictate her work.
Once all hell breaks loose in the final stretch, figuratively and literally, all bets were off. “The third act, for me, is where she’s like, ‘Fuck it.’ You know what I mean?” Sullivan asked. “I’ve lost everything. I’ve got nothing left to lose. So do I want to do this thing that seems super dangerous? Yeah, let’s do that. Let’s do that thing and see where it goes.”
Throughout it all, the key was to “approach it from a real character perspective, so that each time the scenario shifted or the tone shifted, my objective shifted as well.” It isn’t all about thrills, chills, and spills, either, with Shelby Oaks making a pointed dig in true crime’s direction; internet users are happy to use Riley’s disappearance for clicks, and the authorities are happy to appear in a documentary about it, but nobody is actually looking for her except Mia.
“I think it raises an interesting question,” Sullivan agreed. “It’s like, once we sort of make celebrities of people, let’s say in real life, who’ve gone missing or have undergone a tragedy or something like that, do we lose a part of their humanity, and do we start to look at them as characters in a movie or in a book or something like that, and then treat them with less care? And I think that’s true, and I think that is an interesting comment on the situation.”
While there are a handful of important supporting characters in Shelby Oaks, everything flows through the relationship between Mia and Riley. She’s only largely glimpsed through grainy footage, too, and Sullivan agreed with Far Out‘s assessment that it would be fair to call the movie a one-and-a-half-hander, with the former’s journey driven more by the memories of her sister than any tangible proof that she’s still alive.
“Yeah, I think that would be fair to say,” she concurred. “There was a lot that had to happen during shooting in my imagination, and then it was great once I got together with Sarah, and we were able to do some scenes, all that history was already built in, and then, I think it really took off when we had those few moments on camera. There was certainly a lot of inner work that had to happen to build that relationship without having a chance, really, on set to build it that much.”
The downfall of many modern horror movies has been an overabundance of exposition, and as much world-building and mythology as there is in Shelby Oaks, it’s not dialogue-driven. That was a “hard but fun challenge” for Sullivan, who had to “show what I’m thinking and reveal the processes going on in my mind with just my face.” The key was specificity, in the hopes that “the camera catches me having those thoughts.”
Things do become more pronounced in the grand finale, with the film fully embracing its more fantastical side. It was a big change for Mia as a character, but as an actor who admits “it’s always difficult to imagine things that are beyond my scope of reality as I know it,” being absolutely knackered from the shoot was a big help.
“Both the character of Mia and me as an actor were so tired and so beaten down that it’s just like, ‘OK, whatever.’ You’re sort of willing to embrace anything because you’re at the end of it. And, in a way, that exhaustion made it easier, because you lose a bit of your self-consciousness.”
Camille Sullivan
There won’t be any spoilers here, but let’s just say the final shot of Shelby Oaks is open to interpretation. This writer is adamant that the erstwhile villain of the piece got what it wanted all along, and Sullivan feels the same way: “I don’t want to get too much into it, because I like it that it’s up to people’s imaginations a little bit. But my personal interpretation is, yes, that he did, and that I was a fool.” At least we’re on the same page.
As an actor who’s been working for over 25 years, Sullivan has witnessed several seismic shifts in the industry. The landscape of film, television, and now streaming is in a constant state of flux, which understandably isn’t the easiest thing for someone to navigate. Although Sullivan does “feel like I’m a little bit drifting in the wind sometimes, trying to figure out where I should go and what I should do,” that doesn’t have to be a negative. In fact, it can be the opposite.
“That’s also an exciting time,” she opined. “I think it’s really exciting, this rise of new filmmakers, and also the popularity of horror. And I feel like there’s a real momentum to make interesting things that move people and entertain people, and so I try to point myself as much as I can in that direction. What’s interesting, what’s new? What’s going to engage me as an artist?”
With that in mind, Sullivan has built up an eclectic body of work across multiple different mediums, dating back over two decades, so it was fair game for Far Out to pull some of them out of a hat at random and quiz her on her memories and recollections, beginning with her role as ‘Philly AM Assistant’ in Christopher Guest’s acclaimed 2000 mockumentary, Best in Show.
“I had a tiny part in that. That was just, you know, you had a little breakdown of the scene, and then you just improvised it. I had the tiniest little part, but I was with these other great actors, and I was a fan, so I was very much overwhelmed and very excited to be there.” Next up, a five-episode arc as the adult Nina Toth in Taken, the blockbuster 2002 sci-fi miniseries executive-produced by Steven Spielberg.
“Taken was one of my first big, big jobs where I got to do a lot, and was on it for a while, and it was a big production, and it was fun,” Sullivan remembered. “Dakota Fanning was in it, and so I worked with her when she was just wee, and she was great. She was already super professional. It was pretty amazing.”
Sticking with sci-fi, she played a pilot in a 2005 episode of Battlestar Galactica. “Yeah, for that one, they just called me,” she laughed. “I don’t know what happened. They just called me. They’re like, ‘We have this part, and you’re in a fighter jet, do you want to do it?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah.’ So they threw me in the fighter jet. I did a bunch of moves, and I, you know, spoiler, I died.”
Looking back on any actor’s career wouldn’t be complete without mentioning 2008’s straight-to-video creature feature Sea Beast, the 16th entry in the Maneater film series that also starred another friend of Far Out, Brandon Jay McLaren: “What I remember specifically about that, I had a wetsuit on for about three-quarters of the movie, on land, in July, and it was just a pool of water inside.”
“It was just absolutely disgusting,” she added for emphasis. “And a spear gun, that I go pointing at things and never got to shoot.” Not only has Sullivan ticked Marvel from her to-do list with an appearance in 2020’s Helstrom, but as siblings Zoe and Aubree Richards, she got two for the price of one.
“I got to play twins!” she exclaimed. “So there was, you know, the crazy twin who’d been burned in a fire, and then the other twin. And so that was just super fun. And there was a huge fire scene with real fire, and the fire alarms went off, of course, and it was, it was pretty fun.” Last, but by no means least, Sullivan’s longest-running episodic role to date, as Laura Mohr in Shoresy, the Letterkenny spinoff that recently wrapped shooting for its fifth season.
“My friend, Jared Keeso, created it,” she proudly shared. “I knew him years and years ago, when he used to live in Vancouver, and he offered me that part of Laura, and the reception to it has been so good. People love Laura and Shoresy. They’re so into this romantic relationship. I’ve never played anything that’s so crass, but it’s so sweet.”
As you’ve probably gathered, Sullivan has dipped her toes into a lot of genre waters. And yet, there’s one white whale she’s hoping to catch sooner rather than later, and it’s not another Sea Beast: “I’d like to do action. I haven’t done a ton of action. I have done some sequences and some of my own, like fights and stuff like that, and I quite enjoy it. So I’d like to lean in a little heavier to action movies.”
With Shelby Oaks taken completely off the table for recency bias purposes, if anyone wants to see Sullivan’s favourite of her own performances, she knows where to point them. “I would say Hunter Hunter,” she decided. “That one’s really in my heart. I really went on a journey for that one, and it meant a lot. Also, hopefully, everything I do, that is the last thing I did, is the best thing I did. Hopefully.”
In terms of a dream role, nothing instantly sprang to mind, but the actor nonetheless knows which legendary performance she’d love to emulate: Gena Rowlands’ titanic turn in A Woman Under the Influence. “I mean, her performance is so good,” Sullivan accurately said. “It’s her, but also that kind of role that’s a woman who’s so complicated and so on the edge and charming in one aspect, and then also very dangerous, in a way.”
Something along those lines, “that I could really dig into with a great director,” is the goal, but Sullivan still had an ominous final flourish: “Or a villain. I don’t play a lot of villains, and I feel like I’ve got a lot of rage.”
