Culture: In Defence of the Winnie-the-Pooh Slasher

This article originally appeared in The Walrus. Read the full text here.

Rhys Frake-Waterfield’s horror film might ruin your childhood, but it’s a win for creative freedom

Filmmaker Rhys Frake-Waterfield’s directorial debut—released on February 15—is a Winnie-the-Pooh story unlike any other. It begins when Christopher Robin, no longer a boy in Mary Janes but a cardigan-wearing university graduate, returns to the Hundred Acre Wood to introduce his fiancée to his childhood friends. But the friends have fared poorly. Without him to provide for them, they’ve turned hungry and feral. Piglet is now tusked and fearsome, like a full-sized boar. Eeyore has had his pessimistic worldview cruelly vindicated: we see the headstone of his makeshift grave. And Pooh, it seems, has lost interest in his old pursuits, like writing doggerel poetry or throwing sticks in a river. These days, he’d rather kill. The film is called Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, and it’s a slasher.

Within the Pooh canon, the movie stands out, but conceptually, it’s pretty derivative. The original slasher classics from the ’70s—Black Christmas, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Halloween—were atmospheric and meandering, concerned less with violence than with the world-destroying dread induced by the threat of violence. Since then, few slashers have measured up. In short order, the genre became consumed by the quest for novelty, with producers dreaming up new gimmicks—a killer in a hockey mask, a killer in a slicker, a killer disguised as a wax dummy—and then finding ever-more-garish ways to brutalize victims. (In the third instalment of the Final Destination series, two characters are cooked to death in tanning beds, because sooner or later someone had to put that on film.)

Blood and Honey fits right into this tradition. In the trailer, we see hogtied victims and Piglet smashing heads with a sledgehammer. Judging from the promotional material, the film looks so familiar it could’ve been released at any point in the past forty years. Except, in one important respect, it couldn’t have. Had Frake-Waterfield put out his movie before 2022, he might have been sued for copyright infringement.

Before Winnie-the-Pooh was anything else, he was the intellectual property of the English writer A. A. Milne, who invented the character after seeing a bear from Ontario in a London zoo. But fourteen months ago, Milne’s version of Pooh entered the US public domain. The expiration of a copyright is one of those decisive, all-or-nothing events, like the moment a sledgehammer hits your cranium. Suddenly, poretty mushc everything in Milne’s first Pooh collection—the characters, the stories, the line drawings by E. H. Shepard—was up for grabs. (The same copyright expired back in 2007.)

Frake-Waterfield clearly revels in his newfound freedom. He dressed his actor in a bear mask that kind of resembles Pooh, except it’s bloated, contorted, and dripping with blood and menace. He filmed near Ashdown Forest, the real-life inspiration for Milne’s Hundred Acre Wood. And in an interview or the website Dread Central, he reassured horror fans that the killers are “definitely Pooh and Piglet.”

Unsurprisingly, the film has its share of detractors. Alec Dent, culture editor for The Dispatch, characterizes it as a “monstrous reinterpretation” and “a transgression against innocence” itself. “The fact that this is being done to the Winnie-the-Pooh character at all is saddening,” he writes. “The fact that it’s being done with the original stories is even worse.”

Fair enough. Nobody should have to say nice things about the art they find distasteful. I’ll admit that I’m not much keener on the idea of Blood and Honey than Dent is: I emailed the producers to ask if I could see the movie in advance of the release date and was mildly relieved when they told me I couldn’t. But one doesn’t have to like this film to appreciate what it does—the way it makes space for a certain kind of uninhibited creative freedom, which has long been imperilled in our culture and is still imperilled today.

Frake-Waterfield is involved in forthcoming slasher adaptations of Bambi and Peter Pan—versions of both stories are now in the public domain—as well as a Blood and Honey follow-up. The copyright for Tigger, who makes his first appearance in Milne’s second Pooh book, will expire next year, presumably in time for the character to maul and maim his way through a lurid Frake-Waterfield sequel. I doubt I’ll be seeing that movie or any of the others. But I’m grateful to live in a world in which they can still be made.

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