James has a set of rules to abide by when it comes to counting kills. The rules have to be verified by James himself, so don't make assumptions or excuses for why he didn't add a specific character's death. The rules listed are recurring rules or explanations about the kills themselves, they are not to be taken seriously, and James has stated that he will bend the rules in accordance to the film of the episode.
- Characters have to be introduced and physically seen so they can be counted on the list.
- Babies are a controversial and delicate case. Generally, they have to be born and seen in order to be counted. If a pregnant woman dies, then only the woman will be counted as a kill, not the unborn baby. Babies are exempt from the rating system and the Golden Chainsaw and Dull Machete awards because of the subject matter and theme of the show.
- The kill has to be fresh. If it's not displaying evidence of a recent kill, then it doesn't count, since they were killed before the events of the film. The victims have to be visualized, identified, and accurately totaled, especially during wide-angle shots.
- They have to be human or have human-like qualities, so animals or animalistic aliens don't count. There are exceptions to this rule. James sometimes plays with this rule by including animals that were central to the story and because of how famous they arenote ; in Cujo and Jaws, he counted Cujo and the shark as kills, but he didn't any of the sharks from the Jaws sequels. He also jokingly counts the stuffed dinosaur Rex from Wes Craven's New Nightmare since its owner said that it was a brave dino.
- Zoran would set a new precedent for this rule when counting the Tremors franchise. He counted Graboid deaths in addition to human, but the Graboids would have their own separate count and variation of the Golden Chainsaw. This would become the standard for whenever non-human deaths got counted in later videos, dubbed by James as the "Zoran Tremors Protocol" in the Gremlins Kill Count.
- Artificial intelligence can be counted as humans, but they must meet two conditions:
- They must have human-like sentience. A.I. Is a Crapshoot robots like the trio of Killbots from Chopping Mall, the Banana Splits animatronics, and the Buddi dolls (including Reboot!Chucky) generally don't count for this reason.
- They must have a human-like appearance. Combined with the previous rule, this means androids and cyborgs can generally be counted normally, but the Willy's Wonderland animatronics (including Knighty Knight) are treated as non-humanoids similar to Graboids or Gremlins, and Alter Ego's inclusion is vetoed by James in that video's "To The Numbers" gag.
- Undead and supernatural figures are a complicated example, but James said he'll include them on the list if he wants to inflate the numbers:
- James will usually count zombies through infections. If a survivor becomes infected, then they will be counted as dead if they don't amputate or cure themselves.
- Revenant zombies and vampires are counted twice (once for dying as a human, twice for dying as a revenant/vampire) because they display more sentience than common zombies (mindless creatures that are driven to kill and consume, display no sentience or intelligence).
- For films like Zombieland, James will count all zombies that are killed on screen since they make a majority of the body count.
- Possessions count, since the killing human form will generally kill the possessor if they don't evacuate the host. If the possessed human doesn't return to normal, then they too are counted as dead. Possessors also have to possess human forms, otherwise they won't be included on the list. In Christine, James refused to add Christine to the kill count because she was still a car, not a human, and it's never stated if Christine was possessed or sentient.
- Dolls and toys like Chucky are allowed, but only if they display significant amounts of sentience. This rule results in James not counting any of the Demonic Toys as kills (not even Baby Oopsy-Daisy, who displays the most sentience out of them).
- Kills after revivals count as separate deaths. In other words, if a character dies on-screen, then comes back to life and dies on-screen again, each death will be counted as a kill. Several characters in The Babysitter: Killer Queen died and came back to life, and James counted each one of their deaths as separate kills.
- Skeletons (or bastard skellies as James calls them), are off limits from being counted, regardless of sentiencenote .
- Premonitions and dreams do not count; the deaths have to be canonical. (James still ranks these in their own category, but does not count them.) In the Final Destination films, James puts the victims of the various accidents on the list but does not say how each died specifically, as they are often too numerous to describe in the first place. Since the main characters change their fates by avoiding the accidents, they cannot be counted with the other victims.
- Similarly, in movies involving a "Groundhog Day" Loop, James counts every kill he sees, even if the same person dies multiple times. The distinction is made during the actual video and at the Numbers if the same person dies more than once. This rule mostly only applies to Happy Death Day and its sequel, but he's said in podcasts that the precedent is set for if any other horror movies use a time loop.
- The kills must be presented during the film itself, and not in supplementary material such as deleted scenes. If they do take place off-screen, a body must be shown or we must receive canon confirmation of their death. This is why James counts Alex Browning in Final Destination 2, but not Kimberly and Thomas in Final Destination 3, as the former's body was clearly shown in a photograph despite dying off-screen between the first and second movies, whereas the death of the latter two is only mentioned in a deleted scene. Deaths that occur off-screen and are simply confirmed by other characters tend to receive the "Dull Machete" award, especially if all of the other deaths are interesting.
- The death has to be shown before a film transition or before the ending credits, so James can have an accurate tallying of deaths. Final Destination 3 created a dilemma for James, since the actual subway accident happened during a film transition before the credits, despite, the premonition showing how everyone is supposed to die beforehand. Since the survivors didn't return for the sequel and show how they defied the premonition, James is forced to put them on the tally.
- If a victim has already been counted in a previous film's video, they won't be re-counted if their death is referenced or shown again in the backstory of a prequel or sequel.
- If a death is confirmed before we see what happened, he will wait to count it until we see it (usually over the course of a movie series rather than an individual movie).
- For instance, he waited to put Adam from Saw on the count until the third movie, even though the first movie left it obvious he would die and the second showed his corpse, because the third movie actually showed his death.
- Similarly, he pointed out in his Kill Count for It: Chapter Two how he did not count Henry Bowers in his Kill Count for It (2017) two years ago, as the former revealed that he survived the fall in the well.
- Another example is Michael Myers/the paramedic in Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later who gets counted as a half kill, since it isn't revealed until the beginning of the following film that Michael Myers faked his death by switching spots with the paramedic and putting him in the mask.
- If a film has only one kill in it, it will not be covered on the channel, so you won’t see any Paranormal Activity films on the channel. If the movie has way too many deaths to count, then it won't be covered by the channel. He makes a special exception in the Krampus and Evil Bong videos, because no one dies. Instead, he makes them Capture Counts.
- If a canon sequel mentions how many people are killed in its previous film (regardless of whether it's an off-hand conversation or a news report), it can be used to tally up the kills in the latter. This is how James can identify the number of people killed during the prom massacre in Carrie (1976) due to one of the characters in The Rage: Carrie 2 mentioning how many people died in the former.
- While this rule is not related to how kills are counted, James will only perform Kill Counts for horror and horror-related works (even if he has to stretch the definition in some cases). Similarly, if the first movie in a series was primarily horror but the sequels drifted away from the genre (such as Jurassic Park/Jurassic World and The Purge, which had Actionized Sequels), he'll still cover the sequels. He did once make an exception for Avengers: Infinity War, but that turned out to be
an April Fools' Day joke. - In order for mass kills far too big for the amount of bodies to be shown on screen to count, there needs to be A). some kind of visual representation of the massacre in question, and B). a serious, in-universe number to work with. This is how Dude Bro Party Massacre 3 managed to take the crown for the largest kill count with 4295 kills via the Old Parchtown flood incident being given a serious number and being shown in flashbacks, and how Emesis Blue managed to usurp Dude Bro with a much more large 800,054, as Archibald clearly says that there were about 800,000 corpses of failed respawns on site in a recording.
- Bodies that have been Stripped to the Bone do not count as kills, since A). it would unnessacarily inflate the body count, B). it's impossible to identify skeleton corpses by gender, and C). these corpses tend to show up in massive piles.
