Shaky Shivers Budget

What Is the Budget of Shaky Shivers?

Shaky Shivers has no publicly disclosed production budget. No trade report at acquisition or at release attached a number to it, and no reliable third party estimate exists.

The film is dated 2022 because that is the year it was finished and first shown. It had its world premiere at the Overlook Film Festival in New Orleans in June 2022 and its West Coast premiere at Screamfest in Los Angeles on October 12, 2022. Paying audiences did not see it until September 21, 2023, when Cineverse and Fathom Events put it into cinemas nationwide for one night.

What the director has said about the money is the clearest account there is. Sung Kang told Mochi Magazine that "a film like 'Shaky Shivers' had no money to pay people. So it's basically asking somebody to come and do a favor," and described a crew and cast who were "actually believing in this crazy vision." The Hollywood Reporter reported that the financing still took a year to assemble, and that the money bought five weeks at a shuttered Girl Scout camp north of Los Angeles, shot during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. It was Kang's first feature as a director. His second, Drifter (2026), has not published a budget either.

Key Budget Allocation Categories

With no figure to break down, the useful reading of Shaky Shivers is where a no-budget creature feature has to spend and where it gets things for nothing. Both are documented in the film's own press:

• Creature and Makeup Effects: the single protected line item. The script exists because Aaron Strongoni and Andrew McAllister made a documentary about special effects veteran Gabriel Bartalos, who backed the project and offered to lend the writers some of his creations. Bartalos then had to work at no-budget speed. Kang told The Hollywood Reporter, "God bless Gabe Bartalos, because he should have had at least a full day for each creature effect. But we would get there and go, 'Oh, we've got two hours to get this right.'" Daily Dead's review noted that the film "saves its budget for a few practical effects versus spending elsewhere and committing a cardinal indie werewolf sin: the CGI transformation."
• Locations: a shuttered Girl Scout camp north of Los Angeles in California, held for five weeks, plus an ice cream parlour interior. Mochi Magazine counted three main locations in total. A closed camp is production value the budget never had to build: the cabins, the woods and the dirt roads are the entire second half of the film.
• Cast and Crew Working for Favors: Kang's own account is that there was no money to pay people and that participation was a favor. The film is built to survive that, with two leads carrying most of the screen time and seven credited speaking roles in total. Kang cast himself in a small part at the finale rather than adding a paid name.
• The COVID Restart: the production was in blocking rehearsals the week of the March 2020 lockdown when it was shut down. Kang told The Hollywood Reporter, "The movie just evaporated." It regrouped months later at a new location and largely with a new crew, which means a set of prep costs was paid twice before a frame was exposed. Remi Tournois shot the version that got made.
• Score and Post: Timo Chen wrote an original score rather than the production licensing library music, a real cost on a film this size and one that critics noticed in both directions. Post facility Roundabout Entertainment lists Shaky Shivers among its feature work.
• Festival Run in Place of Marketing: there was no prints and advertising budget because for a year there was no distributor. The film played Overlook, HorrorHound, Screamfest LA, Gasparilla, Dark Bridges Saskatoon, the London Soho Horror Festival and the New York Asian Film Festival before Cinedigm acquired North American rights in May 2023. Submission fees and travel took the place of a media spend.

How Does Shaky Shivers' Budget Compare to Similar Films?

Because the figure is not public, the honest comparison is not film against film but tier against tier. These are horror titles at the low end of the theatrical scale whose budgets were disclosed, which is what makes them useful as a frame for the range Shaky Shivers is working in:

• The Blair Witch Project (1999): Budget $60,000 | Worldwide $248,639,099. The floor of the format and the outlier that distorts everyone's expectations of it. Two performers, a wood, and no money, released wide by a distributor that bought it out of a festival. Shaky Shivers took the same route to a distributor and got a single night of screens rather than a phenomenon.
• Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022): Budget $3,000,000 | Worldwide $13,929,670. The same year, a comparable cast size, one location and a horror comedy register. A24 platformed it and then expanded it, which is what a disclosed $3,000,000 and a theatrical campaign buys that a one-night event cannot.
• Happy Death Day (2017): Budget $4,800,000 | Worldwide $125,479,266. The upside case for cheap studio horror comedy with a wide release behind it. The gap between this and a one-night Fathom booking is distribution, not budget.
• Freaky (2020): Budget $6,000,000 | Worldwide $18,073,433. A Blumhouse horror comedy released into the pandemic, so it also had its theatrical window damaged by circumstance rather than by quality, and still reported a gross because it had a conventional release.
• Lisa Frankenstein (2024): Budget $13,400,000 | Worldwide $9,927,714. The cautionary half of the comparison. A period-set horror comedy with studio marketing behind it that did not recoup its production budget, which is a reminder that a bigger disclosed number is not automatically a safer one.

Shaky Shivers Box Office Performance

Shaky Shivers did have a theatrical release, and it reported nothing. Cineverse and Fathom Events put the film in cinemas nationwide on Thursday, September 21, 2023, at 7:00 p.m. local time, a single showing with a filmed introduction from Kang. One-night Fathom engagements are not tracked as a conventional run, and no gross was published for this one. The only revenue figure on record for the film is an estimated $3,801 in domestic Blu-ray sales. The film went to Screambox and digital on October 17, 2023.

The absence of a reported gross is itself the story of the release. A one-night event is a marketing gesture toward a streaming launch rather than a commercial run: it puts the film on a big screen for the audience most likely to buy a ticket for it, then hands the title to Screambox, where the revenue is subscription and licensing and is never broken out per film. Cineverse's own framing said as much, with Bloody Disgusting managing director Brad Miska calling the event "a great way to kick off the fall movie season" rather than the start of a run.

There is no return per dollar figure for Shaky Shivers, because neither side of the calculation exists: the budget was never disclosed and the theatrical release reported no gross.

Shaky Shivers Production History

The film started with someone else's weekend project. Kang learned that his longtime creative partner Aaron Strongoni had quietly written a script with Andrew McAllister, the two of them working from a documentary they had made about special effects maestro Gabriel Bartalos. Bartalos liked the result enough to offer the writers some of his monstrous creations for it. Kang read the script and asked to direct, or in his own words to The Hollywood Reporter, "I pleaded." It took a year to raise the financing.

Then it collapsed. The production was doing blocking rehearsals the week the United States locked down in March 2020 when the producers pulled Kang aside to tell him it was shutting down. "The movie just evaporated," he told The Hollywood Reporter. A few months later the team regrouped, found a new location and started rolling at a closed Girl Scout camp north of Los Angeles, largely with a new crew. The shoot ran five weeks with a summer camp atmosphere on set and a schedule tight enough that signature creature shots got roughly two hours each instead of the day they needed.

Kang was deliberate about who was in front of the camera. He told Mochi Magazine, "I'm Asian, and I gotta put Asian people in it," and that "one of the things that I was insistent on and we fought for is a wide net that we put out to find an Asian American actress to play one of the leads." VyVy Nguyen was cast as Karen opposite Brooke Markham's Lucy. The film is set in 1993 rather than the 1980s the marketing invokes, a distinction easternKicks noted in its review, and its reference points run from An American Werewolf in London to the slacker comedies of the mid-1990s indie scene.

Jean Shim and Luci Y. Kim produced, with Nina Yang Bongiovi, Kevin M. Lin, Michael Y. Chow and Brian Yang executive producing; Brian Yang also carries a producer credit on the film. Remi Tournois shot the film, Wes Smith edited it, Timo Chen scored it and Jena Serbu designed it. Kang then spent a year selling it himself, shopping the finished picture at the American Film Market in November 2022 while it worked the horror festival circuit. Cinedigm, now Cineverse, took North American rights in May 2023, announced the week The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006) veteran Kang returned to cinemas in Fast X. Jack Campbell of Jackrabbit Media handled foreign rights at Cannes.

The route is one Kang has taken before from the other side of the camera. He broke through in Justin Lin's Better Luck Tomorrow (2002) as Han Lue, a film financed largely on Justin Lin's credit cards, with a late contribution from the rapper MC Hammer, and went on to The Motel (2005), Finishing the Game (2007), Snakehead (2021) and Weekend in Taipei (2024) alongside the Fast and Furious films. Shaky Shivers is that same independent economy with him standing behind the camera instead of in front of it.

Awards and Recognition

Shaky Shivers won the Grand Jury Award for Best Narrative Feature at the Gasparilla International Film Festival in Tampa, Florida. It is the film's only competitive win, and Kang singled it out when the distribution deal was announced: "Winning the Grand Jury Award at Gasparilla blew my mind."

Beyond that, the recognition is selection rather than prizes. The film was an official selection of the Dark Bridges Saskatoon Horror Film Festival and played the Overlook Film Festival, HorrorHound Film Festival, Screamfest LA, the London Soho Horror Festival and the New York Asian Film Festival, the last of those in its Diaspora strand. Its Screamfest booking on October 12, 2022 was billed as the West Coast premiere. There is no CinemaScore for the film, because a one-night Fathom event is not polled.

Critical Reception

Rotten Tomatoes has Shaky Shivers at 73% from 11 reviews, with an average rating of 5.60 out of 10 and a split of eight positive notices to three negative. No critics consensus has been published. The Popcornmeter sits at 58% from fewer than 50 ratings, which is too thin to read as an audience verdict. Metacritic has a page for the film but no Metascore: it carries a single scored review, Paste Magazine's, at 29 out of 100.

The positive reviews came out of the festival run and all landed on the same word, which is gentle. Matt Donato of Daily Dead called it "a delightful gateway horror treat that recalls the Goosebumps television show or Are You Afraid of the Dark," while allowing that the film "has a ceiling based on what Kang and company can execute given obvious production limitations." Kimberley Elizabeth of Nightmare on Film Street scored it 75 out of 100 and called it "the perfect teen terror," summing up with "sweet, sour, and sprawling with monsters." Both praised the chemistry between Markham and Nguyen and the practical creature work over anything the film does with plot.

The dissent was blunt and came at theatrical release. Jacob Oller of Paste, writing on the day of the Fathom event, called it "a horror-comedy so hacky it'd make any self-respecting ax murderer hang up his hatchet" and "a cheap two-hander" that "barrels through its bad jokes and horror tropes like it knows it won't survive the night." His most specific objection was economic rather than comic: "Like a lot of no-cash indies that don't have much going on, Shaky Shivers kills time with lots of B-roll footage." Timo Chen's score drew fire in the same review as "overbearing" and "hokey." With 11 reviews on the board and no reported gross, the verdict on Shaky Shivers is a small, warm festival reputation and almost no commercial record to set against it.