Trivia / The Kill Count

• Ascended Fanon: James confirmed, in response to a YouTube comment, that his Tethered counterpart from the Us kill count is named Counter.
• Author's Saving Throw: While it hasn't been a massive complaint, James acknowledged in his Stranger Things 3 Kill Count that some people criticized him for being extremely averse to visual effects. He goes on to praise the special effects of the third season, explaining that while he does prefer practical effects, he's more than willing to point out impressive CGI.
• Approval of God:
  • The official Ice Nine Kills YouTube channel had this to say in the comments of the Kill Count on the music videos for their album The Silver Scream:
    "We're honored to be counted among the iconic Kill Count videos. (Knife emoji)"
  • 5 Second Films were happy to have been included on the Kill Count, and were proud to have had the highest Kill Count on the show with Dude Bro Party Massacre 3. Upon being surpassed by Emesis Blue in 2023, the official 5SF YouTube channel joked that they would have to make Dude Bro Party Massacre 9: Bros in Space! in order to reclaim their title, though they otherwise were happy for Chad Payne and those involved with Emesis Blue.
• Colbert Bump: Some of the movies James covers gain a rise in popularity
  • The aftermath of his review of Society.
  • The same thing happened after he released his Wrong Turn 6 Kill Count — although, morbidly enough, the increase in attention occurred on PornHub due to the fact that the film has a heavy amount of incest.
  • His coverage of the TF2 fan film Emesis Blue opened it up to a considerably broader audience than it would have reached otherwise.
• Corpsing:
  • James has trouble keeping himself from laughing in his ThanksKilling Kill Count, due to the low quality and overall ridiculousness of the film.
  • James audibly laughs trying to say the phrase "dildo slophouse" during the recount for Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning.
• Cowboy BeBop at His Computer:
  • In his Friday the 13th Part 2 Kill Count, James says that Jason is wearing a pillow case over his head when it is actually a potato sack.
  • In the Kill Count for Friday the 13th Part III, James doesn't realize that Jason needed to take his mask off to remove the noose from around his neck. Although in his Recount he acknowledges the reason why Jason had to take off his mask.
  • In the Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter episode, James says that Jason used a machete to kill a character when it is actually a meat cleaver.
  • In his Kill Count for Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning, James says that the imposter Jason put a knife through Matthew Letter's head. However, it was actually a railroad spike.
  • For the first few Halloween films, James says that Michael Myers uses a butcher knife when he's actually using a chef's knife. He changes the terminology to chef's knife for the fourth film, apologizes for his mistake and thanks the viewers for the correction.
  • In Jaws 3-D, James states his shock about Bouchard's decision to save an unconscious woman over his own nephew. In real life, saving unconscious victims are considered a top priority in risk assessments as they are more at risk and their injuries could be more severe. In the video, James might not have seen that the woman was unconscious when the shark broke through the glass.
  • In Demonic Toys, despite, by all accounts, The Kid being killed off and having enough qualities to count as a kill, James does not count him and gives no explanation why, though possibly because James was very confused about the ending and didn’t feel confident adding The Kid as a kill if he wasn’t sure.
  • During the video for The Purge: Election Year, he consistently refers to Minister Edwidge Owens as Minister Jones. Though he says the full name the first time around, at the speed he says it, it sounds like he might be saying "Edwin Jones", which is a more common name that would explain the mistake.
  • An acknowledged one for The Cabin in the Woods. During the segment when he's introducing the characters, James interrupts himself to point out that for years he had thought two characters (Dana and Marty) were siblings when they are unrelated and did not know otherwise until after he had recorded his parts and so he keeps referring to them as brother and sister for the video.
    • In the same video, he quotes Joss Whedon as the one behind the snappy dialogues of The Avengers (2012), showing a clip of Tony's Galaga as an example. That line is actually one of the many, many ad-libs by RDJ.
  • In Leprechaun 2 James made fun of the fact that the Leprechaun's weakness was iron. Although he would later on in the series learn and realize that iron has been known to be a deterrent towards fairies, which includes leprechauns. He addressed this in Leprechaun Returns even referring to himself back then as a dumbass.
  • In the Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III Kill Count, James made fun of and criticized that the term "dusted" isn't a thing. Although as the comment sections show, the term is actually pretty commonly used by US Southerners which included Texans.
  • In the Ready or Not Kill Count, James says that Stevens the Butler was listening to Beethoven when the piece he was listening to was Tchaikovsky's iconic 1812 Overture (although Beethoven's music does appear in the movie).
  • In the Kill Count for The Thing (1982), James notes that there are characters named Windows and Mac(Ready), saying that it's a funny coincidence because Microsoft and Apple hadn't been founded yet in 1982. Both companies had, in fact, been founded in The '70s, though indeed neither the Windows or Mac lines had been launched yet.
  • In his I Know What You Did Last Summer Kill Count he makes a comment on how the strange ending wasn't acknowledged in the sequel, but come the I Still Know What You Did Last Summer Kill Count video he corrects himself when the movie does acknowledge the previous film's ending.
  • James admits he is a gun dummy and sometimes misidentifies firearms. One example is him confusing a lever-action rifle for a lever-action shotgun in the ending to Army of Darkness.
  • In the kill count for Pontypool, James mistakes Dr.Mendez's native Armenian language for German.
• Creator Backlash:
  • In his Kill Count for The Belko Experiment, he makes a joke involving the phrase "pow wow". Upon being informed that it's an offensive term towards Native Americans, he posted a comment thanking people for calling him out and apologizing for using the phrase.
  • In his Kill Count for Urban Legends: Final Cut, he mentions that, in his senior year of college, he made a short film called Motherlover, which he says was even worse than the Stylistic Suck slasher movie that the main characters in the film are making.
    James: No matter how many students get killed making the thesis in this film, I guarantee it's still better than what I made.
• Development Hell:
  • The kill count for Re-Animator had to be censored drastically due to the heavy gore. The episode was released out of schedule (by 1 day) and could only be released with the last-minute help from some sponsors that would allow James to still be paid for his work.
  • The kill count for Candyman was delayed due to a copyright claim from Sony Pictures, forcing James to upload a pre-made kill count for Zombieland a day later to fill in the gap in his schedule. The video was eventually released a week later.
  • The kill count for Ready or Not was delayed due to a copyright claim as well, but the film's directors themselves were able to file an appeal and get the video out a day late.
  • The kill count for Willy's Wonderland sat unreleased due to vague copyright issues surrounding the film lending the risk of the channel getting a copyright strike. However, the Kill Count would eventually be released on October 21st, 2022.
• Distanced from Current Events: The reason for his second hiatus in 2023. Given that his father had just died, James felt uncomfortable hosting a show about counting and cataloguing the deaths in horror movies, and so he passed the show over to Zoran while he took time off to grieve.
• Make-A-Wish Contribution: During The Stinger for the Saw X kill count, the actor playing the fake hostage taker during the into the numbers bit is confirmed by James to have come to the set with the help of Make-A-Wish.
• In Memoriam: The video on A Bucket of Blood is dedicated to actor Dick Miller who passed away two weeks after his Chopping Mall episode, a movie that featured Dick Miller. He even used the extended intro for this episode, including the "dead meat" in Chopping Mall.
• Meaningful Release Date: Several Kill Counts are released around the time a new installment comes out in a series (Such as with the Halloween Kill Counts tying in with Halloween (2018)) or a related holiday/event (Jack Frost (1997) and its sequel were released in winter time, and the Silent Night, Deadly Night movies were released in the months leading up to Christmas).
• Missing Episode:
  • A block was made on the The Thing (2011) Kill Count, but it was eventually cleared. The Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan and Predator Kill Count have been blocked too but were unblocked on September 26, 2018.
  • The Kill Count for Deathgasm was temporarily blocked for a while when the director made a personal copyright claim on it, only to release the claim about five months later.
• Parody Assistance: Ice Nine Kills lead singer Spencer Charnas provides vocals to James's "Numbers" bit for the band's The Silver Scream music videos, parodying the one for "Stabbing In The Dark" with James in his role (and gouging out the eyes of a plastic skeleton).
• Real Song Theme Tune: The main theme is "U Make Me Feel" by MK2.
• Role Reprise: Nathan Baesel reprises his role as Leslie Vernon in Behind The Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon's Kill Count.
• Schedule Slip:
  • For September 2022, James planned on alternating releases of new Kill Counts with Recounts for the Child's Play series, only for several of the latter to keep getting delayed by copyright claims, causing the release schedule to change multiple times.
  • Similarly, the Scream franchise (alongside the recent fifth film) was planned to be recounted in October 2022, but thanks to copyright, the recounts got pushed back to February 2023.
  • During the WGA and SAG/AFTRA strikes of 2023, this happened to a lot of episodes that they were planning on making. James and Chelsea both come from blue-collar union families and are strongly supportive of organized labor, and so out of solidarity with the strike, they announced that, once they'd completed any episodes they were contractually obligated to do (specifically those that they'd already signed sponsorship deals for), they would only cover independent films, foreign films, and other films that were not made by AMPTP-affiliated studios for the duration of the strike.
  • Initially, Terrifier 2 was intended to be the first film covered after the Hostel series, and retroactively after the start of the above-mentioned strikes. However, after a change in guidelines for the strikes, the kill count for it ended up getting moved to right after the strikes end.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: James has occasionally run into copyright claims on his videos despite them being covered under "Fair Use", which can lead to either delays in release of those videos or re-uploads to try and remove the claimed content.
  • The kill count for Mortal Kombat: The Movie ran into this with James' inclusion of the iconic title track. Since the script relied on the viewer having just heard the theme at certain moments, when the video was re-uploaded James got around this by playing the song using a saxophone. And when that was nixed, James had to edit his saxophone playing to cut it down to the three notes used in the theme.
  • The kill count for Train to Busan ended up getting James his first copyright strike, meaning the video got taken down. This also meant that the Kill Count for the sequel Peninsula had to be scrapped for the time being due to fear of a second strike.
  • The video for Deathgasm was taken down a day after it was uploaded with a copyright claim that appeared, according to Dead Meat's twitter, to come from the director himself. The video ended up being a Missing Episode until the director released the claim roughly five months later.
  • James stated in an update video that his ability to cover films owned by Warner Bros. became uncertain following the Warner Discovery merger due to the new management issuing a restrictive edict regarding the usage of footage from their films. This resulted in a video for Malignant being put on hold for the time being.
  • The kill count for Willy's Wonderland was made, but has sat unreleased due to vague copyright issues surrounding the film lending the risk of the channel getting a copyright strike.
  • The kill count for Train to Busan got a copyright strike not long after it got posted, meaning the video was taken down and James had to delay, if not scrap his kill count for the sequel, Peninsula out of concern of it happening again. Thankfully, as of the 8th of August, 2021, the video was put back up and the copyright strike was removed. Whether this means Peninsula will get its kill count going again remains to be seen.
  • The Kill Counts for the Fear Street Netflix trilogy, at least the first two films, appear to suffer through copyright strikes. The first kill count ended up being blocked on YouTube by Netflix, before being put back on a few weeks later. Then 1978 suffered the same fate, being blocked again.
• Troubled Production: In addition to the many examples under Screwed by the Lawyers, he's also suffered this with the Saw Kill Counts, which were plagued by age restriction problems due to the large amount of gore in the series, forcing James to tone down the content in the videos and blur out the carnage. Later problems with YouTube's stricter policies towards gore led to James having to adopt it as standard practice for his videos.
• What Could Have Been:
  • James originally planned on making a Thanks Killing 3 Kill Count for Thanksgiving in 2018. When he looked back at the film, though, he decided against doing it, as the film looked bad and has a majority of puppets that are killed. He has since been able to cover other Thanksgiving horror movies while avoiding that movie... that was, until 2021, when he finally worked up the nerve to cover it.
    James: Fuck you, Turkie!
  • For the channel's two-year anniversary, James originally wanted to cover a slasher film called Dead Meat, but upon watching it, found it to be a bit too much like a student film project to justify covering it.

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