Dead Meat founders James A. Janisse and Chelsea Rebecca have been genre darlings for nearly a decade, and with their feature-length anthology competition Fresh Meat: Volume One, they’ve truly put their money where their mouths are when it comes to discovering and championing emergency horror talent. Following an open call for submissions earlier this summer, the project attracted more than 550 original horror shorts from filmmakers around the world.
After the Dead Meat and Hades Films teams reviewed and scored the submissions, 30 finalists advanced to a public fan vote that drew over 9,000 voters from more than 120 countries. The final lineup features films from the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia, Austria, and the Netherlands, selected in partnership with Atlas Entertainment’s Atlas Literary and Hades Films.
The film ends with a QR code in the credits that lets attendees vote for their favorite short, turning the theatrical event into a final showdown for horror’s rising voices. Each selected filmmaker receives a $2,500 stipend, and all filmmakers will also share in profits from the anthology’s theatrical, digital, and any other potential ancillary releases. Tonight, Fresh Meat: Volume One has its one-night-only theatrical release, giving audiences a chance to help decide which filmmaker takes home the $25,000 grand prize.
Ahead of the big night, FANGORIA sat down with James A. Janisse for an exclusive bite of Fresh Meat.
“Within the first couple of days of reviewing submissions, we came across a few that made it into the final film, so we were already seeing that level of quality right off the bat.”
The initial idea was to feature 10 shorts and run closer to 90 minutes, but the Dead Meat team received so many high-quality contenders that they extended it to 13 shorts, plus the wraparound segment written and directed by Janisse.
Good anthology films should play out like a good mixtape, where order matters as much as quality. “The meeting where we determined the order was probably the most fun,” Janisse tells me, even moreso than the meeting where they selected the final 13 shorts. They briefly considered grouping the shorts into four thematically similar blocks, but realized keeping the audience on their toes, with no idea what was coming next, was a much better approach.
“A guiding point was to completely and continually surprise the audience every time a new short would start,” says Janisse. Timing was also crucial to finding the perfect flow for the anthology, which meant the two longest entries—around 10 minutes each—needed to be in different blocks of shorts. The result is an incredibly stacked anthology where no short feels like the one before it, and I say this as the highest compliment. Anthologies are often viewed as “grab bags,” in terms of quality, but Fresh Meat has one of the most consistently solid lineups I’ve seen in years.
A handful of these shorts feel so fully realized and so full of promise that I immediately put the filmmakers on my radar to see what they do next. (If the filmmakers of Jinx are reading this, start pitching this as a feature, describe it as Smile meets Pluribus, and get yourself a feature deal).
And the potential for a “next” is very real for the featured filmmakers, because they’re not only getting a one-night-only theatrical event, but also a direct throughline to the millions of people who make up the passionate, dedicated Dead Meat fanbase. Unsurprisingly, Janisse says telling the filmmakers they were selected for Fresh Meat was the best part of the whole process.
“There's not a lot of opportunities for people to see horror shorts,” he explains. “For people like us who go to film festivals, we get exposed to them, and so we see how many amazing shorts are out there, and you realize how it's kind of sad how many won't get seen by people who maybe only watch feature films or just don't know where to look for shorts or don't even know that that's an option,” Janisse says that he’s been watching more horror shorts he comes across on YouTube or through curation channels like ALTER, but he knows what this sort of amplification can do to help an up-and-coming filmmaker.
“You see some filmmakers come from their shorts that do well online that get feature deals like Caleb Phillips or even Curry Barker, so we want to make that happen for more people,” Janisse says. And the impact is already being felt, even for filmmakers who weren’t selected for the final film.
“I've seen so much feedback from people saying, ‘I've been wanting to make a short for a long time, and this is what finally got me to do it,’ and so even if they didn't get into the next stage of what it was, they made something, and that's so much more than 99% of people,” Janisse says. “Taking that first step is so difficult, and so many people dream about making a movie and never do it, so anyone who actually did, I am just so proud of.”
Janisse is confident that horror fans will love the Dead Meat team’s selections, acknowledging the 10 years of honing their tastes and perfecting their skills as curators. But if anything is nerve-wracking, it’s that Janisse wrote and directed the wraparound segment, so his skills as a short filmmaker will also be on display.
“It's cliché, but it is vulnerable to write something where it's like, ‘This is a thing that came from my brain, here, go ahead and look at it and judge it and appraise it,’ and if someone doesn't like it, it almost feels like a personal attack,” he explains. “But at the same time I look at the end result and how good it looks thanks to Nico van den Berg and the whole crew who came together to put that on in such a short amount of time.”
The Dead Meat team should be incredibly proud of what they've created, because they've used their platform as tastemakers in the genre to open the gates and welcome in creative voices trying to be heard. They've wagered their goodwill with audiences around the globe on up-and-coming filmmakers, providing a pathway outside the traditional studio system. And folks like Hades Films and Atlas Literary deserve praise for recognizing a good thing and getting on board.
It took a while, but I finally pulled Janisse out of his evergreen humility to admit his wraparound is damn good (because it is), and I gleefully congratulated him on joining the ranks of the filmmakers featured in the anthology by making something worth celebrating. He might be humble, but I don't work for him. Fresh Meat: Volume One is a truly fantastic horror anthology.
Keep your eyes on FANGORIA for updates on where you can see Fresh Meat: Volume One after its theatrical release, and the results of which short film is taking home the grand prize.
And for anyone who submitted and didn’t get in this year, the folks at Dead Meat are looking to replicate the contest in the future. “The first film someone submitted might not have been great, but maybe the next one will be,” says Janisse.
