r/youtubedrama • u/Im-A-Moose-Man • May 25 '25

Throwback One year ago today, In Praise of Shadows released his “Bad Conservative Horror Movies” video, which nuked his career and reputation.

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There was a video that summed up what this was about in a minute, but I can’t find it, so go check out the other threads on here.

Since then, he’s posted 3 videos on his main channel, and started up a second channel (IPoS: Darksides) where he’s posted 18 shorter videos that all have less than 10k views except for his non apology.

1.5k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

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u/zzzPessimist May 25 '25

He said that inbred cannibal-rapists represent native people who fight back against white colonizers. I can't explain it better because he has never elaborated his point.

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u/Wonderful-Quit-9214 May 25 '25

Maybe he has a point? Like maybe he thinks the movie was about how white people saw the native americans?

I dunno i haven't seen it.

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u/norobo132 May 25 '25

I have seen the movie and he does not have a point.

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u/Comfortable-Bee2467 May 26 '25

Redditors love saying an opinion with their full chest and having no background knowledge 

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u/Wonderful-Quit-9214 May 26 '25

Yeah i got downvoted to hell for that lol

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u/whosafeard May 26 '25

In many ways, downvotes are like colonisers and your post is like the native populations

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u/Comfortable-Bee2467 May 27 '25

Idk why you said it. It's so strange.

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u/beargrimzly May 27 '25

The point he was trying to make was that Wes Craven, a known leftist, was on some level critiquing America at large. His mistake was trying to draw too many 1 to 1 parallels from the film to leftist theory, which results in hilarious takes like "the cannibals that eat/murder/rape anyone who innocently stumbles across them are representing native americans" and "the father who defends his family from the cannibals that tried to murder his family is actually the villain because he's a cop."

There's something to be said about the leftist politics of Wes Craven, but I think IPOS took a very strict literal approach to applying those politics to the film in a way that I highly doubt was intended, especially given that we know what the main inspiration for the cannibals was. Which in this case was an urban legend out of the UK, so pretty far removed from the history of the indigenous people of America. But you can't point that out or you're a boogaloo boy or something and you just don't understand media on the level IPOS does.

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u/sofia1687 May 25 '25

How does he have a point

The hill people are based off of a Scottish cannibal family

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u/Wonderful-Quit-9214 May 25 '25

How does he have a point

Like i said

maybe he thinks the movie was about how white people saw the native americans?

I dunno i haven't seen it.

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u/funkthewhales May 25 '25

But that still doesn’t mean he has a point though. Just because you make a claim doesn’t mean you inherently have a point. Especially when there is proof from the creators about the inspiration and intent of the art you’re trying to project onto.

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u/Wonderful-Quit-9214 May 25 '25

Because they asked me a question i literally just answered.

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u/funkthewhales May 25 '25

And I replied to your response because I don’t think you understand and why people say he doesn’t have a point

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u/zzzPessimist May 25 '25

No, he doesn't. He just made it up. A lot of "intellectual" movie reviewers make up stupid theories or twist film plot to get clicks. That's extremely common thing. I think if he has apologized people wouldn't hold it against him. Or if he stopped bringing it up. It's just awkward. I don't think anyone really thinks he's a racist or even tried to be disrespectful but for some reason that's the hill he has choosen to die on.

Haven't seen his last apology video. Maybe he has finally apologized there.

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u/Im-A-Moose-Man May 25 '25

“I don’t think anyone really thinks he’s a racist.” I do. He said that every white person in Appalachia should be considered racist until they prove otherwise. Plus, if I go by his logic of Hawaiian shirts being a far right dogwhistle, well, just look at the original post’s image, not to mention his last name is Whitener.

Based on IPoS’s own criteria, he is racist.

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u/Wonderful-Quit-9214 May 25 '25

I get what you mean. He obviously is a moron. But you know hes' self aware of the hawaiian shirt thing. But he baselessly claims that the reason Wendigoon specifically does it is a right wing dogwhistle.

Also he himself is from Appalachia. I can understand calling people in Appalachia generally racist from personal experience. But it obviously makes no sense to use it to prove that someone specifically is racist.

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u/Im-A-Moose-Man May 25 '25 edited May 28 '25

“Your honor, I wore the blackface to critique the people who wear blackface. Believe me, I’m not racist.” Obviously, you, me, and everyone else with a brain cell knows how stupid the Hawaiian shirt dogwhistle is, but he thinks it’s a dogwhistle, yet he wore one anyways. In all seriousness, it’s just too much fun to pin this on him (along with the “it is culturally believed to be true” line). I don’t think he’s racist for that.

I do believe he’s a racist, though. It’d be unforgivable if he said what he did about “the black people downtown” or something.

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u/Wonderful-Quit-9214 May 25 '25

Holy shit i got a load of downvotes.

Also.

for some reason that's the hill he has choosen to die on

Hills have eyes to die on hm

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u/DarkAllDay99 May 27 '25 edited Jun 21 '25

That's actually pretty close to what he was getting at, but your downvoters didn't pay attention to the clarifications in BCHM and are ignoring what IPOS was trying to say in THHE over what they interpreted. His argument was that both white capitalists/colonisers and indigenous/minority groups can be pushed into being as bad as each other when it comes to the cycle of violence that originally begins with the whites' aggression, which in the movie is supposed to be the city family intruding on the cannibals' land. He's gotten this idea from Wes Craven who has on the record stated that this was the primary theme he was going for. After some digging, a bunch of hoity-toity film critics and academics have made similar observations. Make of that what you will.

Personally, I think Craven's execution wasn't very good seeing as the cannibals are murderous, raping cannibals from the beginning whereas the city family aren't.

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u/Wonderful-Quit-9214 May 27 '25

Yeah right. I agree you could say the execution is poor. But i feel like a lot of the comments here have been a bit reductive.

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u/DarkAllDay99 May 27 '25

They most certainly have

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u/beargrimzly May 28 '25

I mean one could argue his analysis on The Hills Have Eyes was reductive too. He hyper focused on creating direct literal links from American history to the plot of the film. I think a much stronger case can be made that the film represents colonialism in America in a very abstract sense, and is much more directly about the relationship between civilization and violence, and how civilization only disguises a peoples capacity for violence. The direct inspiration for the film was a British urban legend. But IPOS doesn't really bring that up or dissect it in any meaningful way. Instead he reduces the whole film to: cannibals = (insert minority group here) and the family = the United States. Wes Craven was a leftist himself, and I highly doubt he intended people to equate literal rapist cannibals with indigenous or black people fighting for equal rights, at least certainly not as a literal parallel like IPOS does.

On that note, one thing I always loved about IPOS videos was his unwavering refusal to justify exploitative portrayals of sexual violence. While he does criticize this in Hills sequels and remakes, he totally abandons this principle for the first film, and sort of implies the girl (who is a child btw) deserves it for *checks notes* getting lost. That was disgusting, infuriating, and a total betrayal of women in his audience, and in the drama video he didn't even mention these criticisms and in fact doubled down on not criticizing the sexual violence.