Between ‘Bring Her Back’ and ‘Shelby Oaks,’ Are YouTubers the Future of Horror Movies?

Bring Her Back, a 2025 horror movie from the creators of Talk to Me, has been an HBO Max chart fixture for the past month. Shelby Oaks, a new horror movie from NEON, is in theaters now. The movies don’t have much in common, beyond some contemporary horror-movie common ground (grief, sibling connections, the summoning of demons). Bring Her Back is a grim, gnarly Australian horror drama about a woman who adopts a pair of siblings for use in a nefarious resurrection ritual, while Shelby Oaks is an American semi-found-footage movie about an adult woman searching for her missing sister. They do have another major thing in common, though: Both movies were made by YouTubers.

Granted, even the type of YouTuber varies between the two films. Chris Stuckmann, the writer/director behind Shelby Oaks, has been reviewing movies on the platform for years. (He’s one of those guys with the cringeworthy thumbnails and the virtual-shelves backdrops.) Danny and Michael Philippou, who made Bring Her Back and their previous A24 hit Talk to Me, uploaded videos to their RackaRacka channel, showcasing hybrids of stunt videos, special effects demos, and absolutely horrible comedy sketches. With such a diversity of content uploaded by amateurs, professionals, and everyone in between, it makes sense that some of these #content creators would eventually make the transition to a larger canvas.

What makes somewhat less sense is Bring Her Back itself. Stuckmann’s Shelby Oaks has its own set of baffling problems, including a bizarre incorporation of YouTuber characters and a storyline that vaguely mischaracterizes what the early days of the platform were actually like. (Specifically, the movie’s YouTubers run what resembles a cable ghost-hunting/paranormal investigations show.) But Bring Her Back, like Talk to Me before it, was taken more seriously by critics and audiences at large, more capably imitating the rhythms of a “real” movie. Orphaned teenager Andy (Billy Barratt) and his younger, visually impaired sister Piper (Sora Wong) are placed with foster mom Laura (Sally Hawkins), and the movie immediately explores elements of grief and abuse. Though it appears at first that Laura’s mute foster song Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips) may be disturbed, it eventually becomes (sort of) clear that he’s part of a gruesome plan to resurrect Laura’s dead daughter.

As with Talk to Me, this involves a weirdly overcomplicated ritual, which Laura picks up from studying a VHS tape offering the gory details. The Philippou brothers have a strong sense of the uncanny — Laura poring over her VHS instructions are among the movie’s more memorable moments — and their origins as YouTube mischief-makers apparently have steeled them for envelope-pushing horrors, like a scene where Oliver attempts to eat a kitchen knife. There’s a feral, nasty edge to the movie’s violence, a genuine discomfort that a lot of horror directors, even good ones, are a little skittish about touching.

Maybe, though, some of those filmmakers don’t want to come off like bratty edgelords. Despite the credibility boost Bring Her Back receives from the committed Hawkins performance, it often feels like the Philippous are taking advantage of her trust to put her through a bunch of grim horror-movie stunts. They don’t draw real thematic connections between the ridiculously elaborate resurrection ritual (which involves puking a corpse onto a living body to facilitate a body-jumping resurrection), the horrifying details of Oliver’s condition, the profound sense of loss that must eat away at Laura, and the deeply complicated emotional reaction Andy might have to the death of his abusive father. It’s just a goulash of misery, heavy on difficult-to-follow and arbitrary supernatural mythology. In other words, it’s definitely a movie from the creators of Talk to Me, where teenagers discover that by touching an embalmed hand and saying “talk to me” allows them to commune with the dead, then saying “I let you in” allows the dead to possess them, but then someone else has to take the hand away and blow out a candle within 90 seconds or else the spirit will stay attached and try to make the body commit suicide, which is also how one character’s mother died. Their next movie should be called Got All That?

All of these rules and connections seem designed to bolster the movies’ horror bona fides, rather than just focusing on making them feel at all recognizably human. Their work is usually bracing and compelling for 20 or 30 minutes, before their movies let slip just how untethered they are from any particular emotional reality; a bunch of messed-up stuff happening and characters feeling sad or mad about it is not the same as a meaningful exploration of grief. The Philippous make movies like they first heard about grief from… other horror movies.

That’s a big problem with Shelby Oaks, too, despite it not trafficking in the same level of provocation. Stuckmann’s movie uses quasi-found footage, fake documentary interviews, faked local news footage, and more old-fashioned ghost-town atmosphere to stretch its story across over a dozen years all while completely avoiding any actual sense of time’s passage. Despite ample footage that’s supposed to catch some of them with the casual realness of early YouTube, none of these characters really live off-screen. The movie’s twelve-year time jump may be an attempt to bridge the gap between “old” YouTube (which the movie barely gets into anyway) and today, which might have been an interesting narrative if the movie did anything with it. For the actual story at hand, the time jump makes even less sense, given that the entire climax of the movie hinges on something that needs to have happened recently, rather than sometime in the decade-plus of intervening years.

Bring Her Back and Shelby Oaks both do a great job of transcending their YouTube roots, in that neither of them resemble an upload being projected onto an oversized screen. No, their failures are stranger than that; Shelby Oaks plays more like a bad video game adaptation, like that Five Nights at Freddy’s movie written by the game’s seemingly movie-illiterate creator, while Bring Her Back feels a bit like it’s been made by aliens. That they’ve both received so many positive reactions feels like an apex of a new permissiveness for horror, which has replaced past tut-tutting about the genre’s moral implications; it’s probably a net positive, but boy, are these movies getting the benefit of the doubt. Ideally, having YouTubers work on horror could tap into newer forms and shapes of familiar, nagging fears and anxieties. Instead, so far it’s played out the way a lot of the more middling YouTube shows compare to their traditional TV ancestors: a janky yet frictionless imitation of what came before.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.