Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey is a 2023 British independent slasher film produced, directed, written, and edited by Rhys Frake-Waterfield. The first instalment of The Twisted Childhood Universe, it is a horror interpretation of A. A. Milne and E. H. Shepard's Winnie-the-Pooh books and stars Nikolai Leon as Christopher Robin, Craig David Dowsett as the titular character, Chris Cordell as Piglet, and Amber Doig-Thorne and Natasha Rose Mills. It follows Pooh and Piglet, who have become feral murderers, as they terrorise a group of young university women and Christopher Robin when he returns to the Hundred Acre Wood five years after leaving for college.
The film was first announced in May 2022, when it drew widespread attention due to its premise involving a character that was a childhood icon, and it was met with divided reactions. It was produced by Jagged Edge Productions in association with ITN Studios and went into development after the 1926 Winnie-the-Pooh book entered the public domain in the United States in January 2022. The film was shot in six days in the Ashdown Forest of East Sussex, England, which served as inspiration for the Hundred Acre Wood in the original books.
Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey was originally set for a direct-to-video release in October 2022, but a spike in online popularity expanded it at first to an intended nationwide one-night event, before it evolved into a major worldwide theatrical release. It premiered in Mexico on 26 January 2023, and was theatrically released in the United Kingdom on 10 March. Despite receiving overwhelmingly negative reviews from critics with many considering it one of the worst films ever made, and received five Golden Raspberry Awards, including Worst Picture, the film was a box-office success, grossing $7.7 million worldwide on a budget of $50,000. A sequel, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2, was released in 2024.
Plot
Years ago, a young boy named Christopher Robin met and befriended a group of anthropomorphic creatures—Owl, Rabbit, Eeyore, Kanga, Roo, Piglet and Winnie-the-Pooh—in the Hundred Acre Wood. Not long after, Christopher had to leave them to attend college; with the coming of winter and its lack of food, the starved creatures decided to eat Eeyore. Traumatised by their actions, the others developed a hatred towards humans, including Christopher Robin (due to his departure), and return to their feral instincts, making a promise to never talk again.
Five years later, Christopher, now an adult, goes back to the Hundred Acre Wood, accompanied by his fiancée Mary, and finds the place deserted. At night, the couple are ambushed by Piglet, who strangles Mary to death with a chain, before he and Pooh drag Christopher into the woods.
Some time later, university students Maria, Jessica, Alice, Zoe, Lara, and Tina rent a cabin in the Hundred Acre Wood, so Maria can move on from a traumatising stalking experience. Tina, lost in the woods, is attacked by Pooh. She hides in a nearby garage, but Pooh finds her and grinds her into a woodchipper. Later, back in his treehouse, Pooh whips Christopher with Eeyore's tail and showers him with Mary's blood.
As night falls, Pooh and Piglet ambush the cabin. Pooh runs Lara's head over with a car before Piglet kills Zoe with a sledgehammer. Maria and Jessica arrive, watching Alice being abducted. They follow Pooh and eventually rescue Alice. Afterwards, the trio break into Pooh's treehouse, freeing Christopher from his chains, and another captive, Charlene. She explains her plan to get revenge on Piglet, who mutilated her face. Charlene summons Piglet, but he mauls her to death after Pooh subdues her. Pooh chases Maria and Jessica into the woods, but Alice stays behind and ambushes Piglet. After Alice knocks Piglet unconscious with his sledgehammer, Pooh arrives and fatally impales her with a knife through her open mouth.
On the road, Maria and Jessica seek help from a group of local men passing by, whom Pooh easily slaughters. Maria attempts to run Pooh over with their pick-up truck but crashes and blacks out. Upon awakening, she witnesses Pooh dragging Jessica away, then decapitating her. Christopher suddenly appears and crushes Pooh between the truck and his car. Pooh barely survives, frees himself, grabs Maria and holds her at knifepoint. Christopher pleads for Pooh to release her, promising to stay with him forever. Pooh, breaking his non-speaking vow, furiously tells Christopher "You left," and slits Maria's throat. Seeing that his former friend is now beyond help, Christopher flees the woods as Pooh repeatedly stabs Maria's corpse in anger.
Cast
Production Development
On 24 May 2022, Josh Korngut of Dread Central reported that a Winnie-the-Pooh-based horror film adaptation was in development. The characters' rights had been owned by The Walt Disney Company since 1966 and, while Disney retains exclusive rights to the depictions of these characters from their own franchise, the first Winnie-the-Pooh book went into the public domain in the U.S. on 1 January 2022. After the US copyright lapsed, Rhys Frake-Waterfield began development on Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey the same year. Speaking to Variety, Frake-Waterfield described the plot as both Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet turning into homicidal maniacs after Christopher Robin leaves them for college. He stated:Christopher Robin is pulled away from them, and he's not [given] them food, it's made Pooh and Piglet's life quite difficult... Because they've had to fend for themselves so much, they've essentially become feral. So they've gone back to their animal roots. They're no longer tame: they're like a vicious bear and pig who want to go around and try and find prey.Due to budgetary reasons, Frake-Waterfield reimagined the characters as "half-man, half-bear" and "half-man, half-pig". The masks used for Pooh and Piglet in the film were created by the American prosthetic-mask manufacturing company Immortal Masks. On 16 February 2023, Frake-Waterfield explained in an interview with Yahoo! Entertainment that the first draft of the film was meant to be closer to the original source material. However, The Walt Disney Company still retained the exclusive rights to the depictions of these characters from their own franchise, so Frake-Waterfield had to scrap the original script and rewrote it to avoid any legal trouble. Scott Jeffrey claimed that the first version was much darker than the final film, featuring people chained up and infant versions of Pooh locked in cages. Executive producers rejected the premise and requested a simple, straightforward narrative, initially focusing on "hot girls in a cabin." While Frake-Waterfield and Jeffery found the premise boring, they went through with it as long as it meant they would get money. The producers stated that they struggled finding cast and crew members, as many of their colleagues turned down working on the film. The film had merely been made on a "conveyor belt" of direct-to-video films they were producing, and while Frake-Waterfield believed the film would gain some interest, neither of them thought it would actually go anywhere in terms of success. Jeffery stated that he believed the film would simply receive "a little bit of clickbait, it might get, like, Bloody Disgusting might post it and get a couple of retweets, you know. I thought it might be that."
Filming
Principal photography for Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey began in April 2022, with filming taking place in the Ashdown Forest of East Sussex, England over a period of six days on a budget of $20,000. Jagged Edge Productions produced the film in collaboration with ITN Studios. Frake-Waterfield did outfit Pooh with a red shirt, but was careful to avoid other iconic elements from Disney's depictions that could pose a copyright issue. The director reportedly searched through Airbnb for filming locations near Ashdown Forest for Pooh's "lair" and the cabin. The original cut of the film varied differently from the final version; for example, Christopher Robin was killed in the opening scene, and the film ended with Maria successfully escaping, with a closing narration revealing Winnie-the-Pooh was eventually arrested and imprisoned. Additionally, Pooh had way less screen time, only appearing in 20–25 minutes of the film's runtime.
After posting several screenshots of the film on IMDb, Jeffery woke up one night to go to the toilet. As he was unable to go back to sleep afterwards, he began scrolling through Twitter through his phone and discovered multiple articles discussing the film. This caused him to realise that overnight, the film had blown up in popularity on the internet, much to his shock. Cast and crew members have expressed that they were massively surprised by the film's viral hit. Following this, Jeffery tried to convince ITN executives to give them an increased budget to reshoot the entire film. While ITN refused to do so, fearing it would get shut down by The Walt Disney Company, they gave the producers enough money for several "pickup days" nonetheless. According to Amber Doig-Throne, the film was reshot at least three times. This would lead to the film being the most expensive film Waterfield ever directed and the most expensive film produced by ITN around the time, with a budget of under $50,000.
Music
In July 2022, American composer Andrew Scott Bell was announced as a provider for the score. On 14 July 2022, Bell uploaded a video to YouTube titled "Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood, Honey, and Violins" that documented how he drove from Los Angeles to San Francisco, with his manager Mike Rosen, to collect a honeycomb-filled violin from an experimental luthier to compose the film's soundtrack. In an interview with Dread Central, Bell explained how he got involved with the production of Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey upon hearing about the film after it went viral upon the announcement. He said:Back in late May, a day or so before the film went massively viral, I started seeing some online chatter about a Winnie-the-Pooh horror movie. I remember looking it up on IMDb and finding the director Rhys Frake-Waterfield on Instagram where his story had a screenshot of a person's comment saying something to the effect of "your movie is ruining our childhoods". His reaction was, "that's what I'm trying to do, ruin everyone's childhood".
Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) is the soundtrack album for the film. Andrew Scott Bell composed the film's score. The soundtrack was released by ITN Studios on 15 February 2023.
Release Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey was originally planned to be released in October 2022, but the increased publicity and reshoots motivated the change to a 2023 theatrical release. The film premiered in Mexico on 26 January 2023, and was released by Cinemex. It was originally set to be released for a one-night event across cinemas in the United States, United Kingdom and Canada in February 2023, with Fathom Events and Altitude Film Distribution acquiring the rights to release it in their respective countries.
In January 2023, it was announced that the film had been given an expanded theatrical release starting on February 15 in the United States. The film was then released in the United Kingdom on 10 March 2023. For one week, the film was re-released in cinemas in the United States on 17 March 2023. The Hong Kong and Macau release was cancelled due to purported technical glitches, but the film may have been censored due to Internet memes comparing Winnie-the-Pooh to CCP general secretary Xi Jinping; Christopher Robin was banned in China in 2018 for that reason.
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