The 1926 fairytale Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne just lost its copyright protection five months ago (95 years after publication and 66 years after the author died) and a horror slasher version of it is already in the works. Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey takes the chubby beloved bear and turns it, and fellow Piglet, into serial killers.
Directed and written by Rhys Frake-Waterfield, the film wrapped filming earlier this month and is currently in post-production.
“Because of all the press and stuff, we’re just going to start expediting the edit and getting it through post-production as fast as we can,” Waterfield said to Variety. “But also, making sure it’s still good. It’s gonna be a high priority.”
The film is produced by Jagged Edge Productions, which is not new to horror. Its past published works include The Curse of Humpty Dumpty and The Legend of Jack and Jill, both of which aren’t anything like what you remembered from your childhood.
The movie synopsis is rather brief right now, saying that Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey “follows Pooh and Piglet as they go on a rampage after Christopher Robin abandons them”.
The film was shot in 10 days, and Waterfield said that we shouldn’t expect anything close to Hollywood-level quality. Or anything close to Disney’s Winnie the Pooh for that matter.
While Milne’s version of Winnie the Pooh is now in the public domain, Disney still retains rights to its interpretation of the anthropomorphic teddy bear. That means no red shirt Pooh or Piglet. And no Tigger, since it is still in copyright, though Eeyore does have its own tombstone in the film, after being eaten by a starving Pooh and Piglet.
“We’ve tried to be extremely careful,” Waterfield said. “We knew there was this line between that, and we knew what their copyright was and what they’ve done. So we did as much as we could to make sure [the film] was only based on the 1926 version of it.”
Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey does not have a release date yet but we can expect that it will be out soon. Unless Disney has something to say about it, that is.
Jimmy is on a never-ending quest to finish his ever-expanding library of games, but he keeps getting sidetracked by a mountain of books to read, and a trail of actual mountains he hopes to climb.
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