Maybe We Can Save the World With ‘Dr. Giggles’: Our Chat With In Praise of Shadows [Digital Feature]
Here at Dread Central, our Digital Features give us the chance to spotlight the creators, projects, and talent pushing horror in bold new directions. These profiles let us dive deeper into the genre stories we can’t stop thinking about. For this edition, we’re joined by YouTube creative Zane Whitener, better known by their channel name In Praise of Shadows. Whitener’s always been something of an academic, and here, we dive into the themes of art, survival, and what this century’s horror is really all about.
This month, the Chicago Tribune eliminated the position of film critic, leaving renowned writer Michael Phillips without a home, at least for now. A week before that, Vanity Fair announced a restructuring of its own, ousting Richard Lawson and David Canfield as the publication pivots away from “news aggregation, reviews, and trade coverage.”
I didn’t plan for such grim goings-on before sitting down to chat with Zane Whitener, better known as In Praise of Shadows for his YouTube channel focused on “Horror history, reviews, and retrospectives.” With 390,000 subscribers, you’ve probably seen a video of theirs. Perhaps the three-hour epic “In Defense of Nicolas Cage,” or more recently, a pointed, evocative interrogation of the Sleepaway Camp franchise.
“Horror… It’s been a part of my life kind of forever. With my mom, some of the earliest movies I remember her introducing me to were The Silence of the Lambs and The Shining… and not even that long after The Silence of the Lambs had hit video in the 1990s,” he said. Whitener and I have that in common. While my friends were boarding The Magic School Bus, my mom was sitting me down for a complete dive into the Child’s Play series. I was five and it scared the hell out of me, but Moms know what they’re doing.
And while that family experience matters, immersion in genre—immersion in film—retains value beyond our own singular experiences. Arts criticism is a bedrock of culture. “I think it’s hugely important. It goes back to almost that if a tree falls in the forest and doesn’t make a sound, you know? Art is made to have a conversation. And without that critical conversation, art loses its importance,” he explained. “Culturally, everything about art is really about people. And I think that without the facilitation of that conversation around it, without the input of people, it’s just stuff. It is just being put out there.”
And what is that stuff? Whitener references streaming in particular, the kind of pump-and-dump horror that arrives on a given platform without any announcement, is voraciously consumed over a weekend, and then swiftly forgotten about. The kind of art that’s really anti-art. Not Dr. Giggles, Manny Coto’s 1992 slasher that Whitener fondly recalls watching on VHS at a friend’s house. No, the kind of stuff whose reason is background noise. It’s there to be heard, but not necessarily listened to. It’s a grim time, no doubt, all the more so for persons like Whitener and myself whose professional lives are inextricable from horror and film.
“I think it’s kind of a continuing facilitation of the degradation of the importance of art, I guess,” he said. Whitener, luckily, is more optimistic than I am, and that optimism was infectious. “I hope it gets better, and I think it probably will. I think a lot of people are maybe slowly realizing that by devaluing the theater-going experience, that’s led to a whole host of other problems,” Whitener explained. “And I hope it changes. You and I both working online with our criticism work is part of that change. You know what I mean? But I don’t know. I hope so.”
Whitener’s sage cadence belies his youth, and that’s hopeful. Younger audiences are, after all, the stewards of whatever comes next. Whitener is playing his part, seeing “four or five movies a week” at the theater. We bond over that. I’m a theatrical purist. It’s why my friends in high school were mad at me after I dragged them to see Alexandre Aja’s Piranha 3D. We didn’t talk about it, but I’m almost certain Whitener did the same.
Not everything was doom and gloom, of course. I had to cheekily ask about being a hater. It’s a moniker I’ve been hit with lately, especially as the slate of mainstream releases has impressed me less and less every year. I still love plenty of things, but my critical lens has been more finely tuned, and I’m more engaged with the things I don’t like. Whitner shared, “I think it’s important as a critic to be able to say why you think things are good,” and he’s right. Contextually, he spotlights a burgeoning majority of channels whose focus is exclusively on the bad, an unintended consequence of the death of irony and a collective inability to take anything seriously.
There’s a distinction, though, that I’m keen to agree with Whitener on. “I’m known for being kind of a hater as well on a lot of things. And I think it is important to be able to vocalize why you dislike something,” he said. “I think actually as an artist, you can learn more from things that you don’t jive with than the things that you do.” The beating heart of criticism is double-edged. No, we shouldn’t be celebrating media conglomerates for a great year at the box office, but we shouldn’t concede to the same noxious ideals as art’s most vocal critics. In other words, quite simply, it’s okay to like things, and it’s okay not to. So long as you engage critically with that impulse, even the worst things will matter in some small way.
That sincerity, that unabashed appreciation and love of art, was really at the center of this whole conversation, even if neither of us was willing to fully geek out over the movies that made us. “I think that horror is generally lacking, not as a blanket statement, but a lot of projects are lacking sincerity, and I think that harms a lot of work,” Whitener said. I’ve shared a similar sentiment before. The world is on fire, metaphorically speaking (though also not), and singularly—though I know I’m not alone—that grief is intertwined with my moviegoing experiences more and more. When we feel so heavily and deeply, is it too much to ask that the movies we watch do the same?
Emilie Blichfeldt’s The Ugly Stepsister does, and Whitener was certain to wrap with a recommendation to check that out alongside Joe DeBoer and Kyle McConaghy’s Dead Mail. Both titles are presently streaming on Shudder. We shared a love for the indie scene before we called it for the day, and while Whitener may not have guessed it, I was the most relieved I’d been in quite some time. Things are grim, and while horror reflects that, it can be too easy to get lost in the muck of our own feelings and regress into isolation. It’s that panicked feeling that no one knows quite how we feel, that no one senses just how hard things really are.
Movies, to quote Whitner, are about people. And when we share them, such wonderful things can happen. Commiserating about the bad ones or celebrating the greats, art is more than just a window—it’s connective tissue. It keeps us bound, rendering the solo weight of the world a collective burden. Things are a little bit easier that way, and I’m grateful to know that I shoulder that weight alongside Zane. And that got me thinking about a tagline for The Silence of the Lambs. “Some people know only fear. Some people know only silence.” I can’t make the fear go away, but when chatting with creatives like Whitener, we can all, in our own way, dispel a bit more of the silence.
Categorized: Dread Central Digital Feature
