Featured image: (Pacer Graphic / Darby Self)
Content creation can take many different forms, from the “let’s play” style of gaming to vlogging and ASMR; there have been numerous types of content for viewers to enjoy.
One style of content creation that gained popularity over the past nine years is movie kill counts. While they’ve vaguely been around on the internet for a while, they really became monopolized in 2017 with the YouTube channel Dead Meat.
From videos to podcasts to streaming, Dead Meat became a staple channel on YouTube. Its frontman James A. Janisse took the world by storm with his charming personality. The main attraction of the channel is easily, its Kill Count. The Kill Count is a tally of all of the kills that take place in horror and horror-adjacent media. While Dead Meat recommends experiencing the movie before the Kill Count, many fans use the video type as a way to watch horror movies they may not want to watch or don’t have access to.
After experimenting with comedy-driven channels on YouTube in the early 2010s, James decided that it was time for a change. He wanted to create a channel that aligned closer to his personal enjoyment. His obsession with horror movies played a role in this, and after spending six months cultivating it, he and his future wife, Chelsea Rebecca, created Dead Meat.
The first Kill Count was released on April 7, 2017, it focused on the initial film in the most iconic horror franchise of all time, “Friday the 13th.” Fans who followed James and Chelsea from their earlier comedy channels were a large part of making Dead Meat successful in its early stages. The kill counts produced by Dead Meat had never been done on such a scale before. The style of the channel and the personality of James showed promising signs of success.
The earlier format of the Kill Count is not the same as we know it today. Whereas James initially covered only the kills, nowadays he gives information on the production behind the different titles. This made the channel more intriguing. Not only were fans getting a list of kills, but they were also getting information they would likely never have heard before. This versatility easily contributed to the channel’s long-term rise.
“I never wanted the channel to be a one-trick pony. It was always meant to celebrate horror movies in a comprehensive way,” Janisse said when talking about his goals for Dead Meat during the channel’s 500th Kill Count episode celebration.
Fifteen months after the first Kill Count, Dead Meat reached 1 million subscribers. This was a massive milestone for the blossoming channel. It was shortly after this that it saw a boom in viewership. Videos would consistently reach more than 1 million views within 24 hours.
On Jan. 16, 2020, Dead Meat filed to incorporate and become an S corporation, opening a business account for that separate entity around the same time. Its editors were now W-2 employees with hourly rates instead of 1099 freelancers paid on a project-by-project basis. This was easily the jumping-off point for Dead Meat. After officially becoming a corporation, YouTube audiences had no choice but to acknowledge the rapid success of one of the website’s hardest-working channels.
Now, almost 10 years later, Dead Meat has gained more than 6 million subscribers on its main channel. They’ve counted millions of kills across a variety of different media and, according to James himself, still have many more ahead of them. The tale of Dead Meat is easily an inspiration to any and all aspiring content creators.
As the show’s iconic host always says: Be good people.
