If you asked director Rhys Frake-Waterfield what his first choice would be if he had to adapt any beloved children’s tale as a horror movie, Winnie the Pooh wouldn’t have been top of the list.
“There were certain cartoons I grew up watching thinking they were quite ominous, like Courage The Cowardly Dog, as well as scary episodes of Teletubbies and Thomas The Tank Engine. I never actually thought about Winnie the Pooh making a perfect killer until he entered the public domain, but hearing that news triggered an immediate reaction.”
Now arriving on home entertainment after causing a stir in cinemas earlier this year, the low-budget horror-comedy Winnie The Pooh: Blood And Honey went from initial idea to finished feature in little more than a year, the rapid process of getting it onscreen intriguing enough to warrant a movie in itself.
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As the director pointed out to Zavvi, A.A Milne’s original Pooh stories only entered the public domain on January 1st, 2022, and it was only a matter of days before his team were planning on putting something together.
“By January 5th, we were messaging the distributor who we work with a lot asking them if they’d want to finance it, even though it was just a concept at this point. We couldn’t have moved faster if we’d wanted to: it took three months from saying let’s do it to arriving on set.”
As a producer, Frake-Waterfield is used to this rapid pace of production; in the space of two years leading up to Blood And Honey, he was a credited producer on a whopping 37 low-budget horror productions, by his own calculations. This averaged out at about three a month, with his work on several of those still happening in the background as he was trying to get Pooh made.
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This means that he’s also used to having to solve problems at the eleventh hour, with the entire screenplay needed to be fully rewritten just three days before he turned up on set.
“The original writer’s screenplay had so much stuff in it that was literally unfilmable. Only the elements from Milne’s 1926 book were in the public domain, and in his script, there were loads of things that go beyond that, such as Pooh saying “oh bother”, and the characters playing Pooh sticks – aspects that didn’t appear until later, which are still owned by Disney.
“All of these elements are so ingrained within Pooh, but we didn’t want to agitate Disney, so I had to do a last-minute rewrite. It took me about three days, because it was after one production finished, and I was sitting down and starting to prepare for this one; there was barely any time to rewrite it and get it in a fit state to go”.
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This was part of the reason that Pooh and Piglet have been transformed into silent killers for this movie, having taken a vow of silence ever since Christopher Robin left them behind, embracing their violent, animalistic ways in the years since he last set foot in One Hundred Acre Wood.
“One reason is that it’s easier to make a villain more horrifying on a low budget if they’re silent – I drew a lot of inspiration from Jason and Michael Myers. But the other reason is that we were in uncharted territory, we had to be careful not to encroach on Disney’s interpretation of the character too much.
“The actor might have improvised a line that included “oh bother” at one point, which could have gone through post-production and into the finished product accidentally – I never wanted to take that risk. Something else we needed to be careful of is when he talks, Disney’s Winnie the Pooh has a very distinctive voice and tone to him.
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“You can’t just copy that, because that wasn’t in the original material. So that’s why we also had to have him have a completely different tone when he does finally speak; it doesn’t resemble what you initially imagined, and a lot of people won’t want that.
“I understand some people are going in hoping to hear that voice say the famous catchphrases, wearing his red t-shirt – but if I tried to depict that, I’d get sued!”
Yes, the caution needed for the project extended to the character design. The original book highlights that Pooh is yellow, so that could be lifted, but from there they made him “half human, half bear”, to make him appear more unsettling than a “hairy bear walking around”.
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The shoot itself only lasted ten days, but it still gained extra points for authenticity, with several scenes shot in Ashdown Forest in East Sussex, Milne’s childhood inspiration for One Hundred Acre Wood.
At every turn, the director was striving to make the film as “camp and silly” as possible, arguing that “it’s Winnie the Pooh with a knife as a serial killer, it’s supposed to be fun. It’s not Halloween where you’ve got the literal embodiment of evil walking around, you’re supposed to laugh when you see him”.
A personal highlight for this writer came when a character went up to Pooh’s face to call him a “nonce”, a moment sorely lacking from any Disney adaptation. Despite the silliness of the tone, there were a few moments where Frake-Waterfield aimed to push himself to try and make his honey-loving bear a serious, terrifying threat.
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“There’s a scene in which he stands ominously in front of a fire, that was me trying to play around the environment and make him feel scary within it. It’s always a challenge because he looks so goofy – but I knew that moment was where I had to try and see if I could pull it off.”
The success of Winnie The Pooh: Blood And Honey, which has grossed $4.6 million worldwide off the back of a $100,000 budget, means that the director is already planning a sequel that will use aspects from Milne’s next works to come into the public domain. And yes, this does include a particularly violent take on Pooh Sticks.
But the director’s plans don’t end there: he has two more twisted tales, based on Bambi and Peter Pan, in the works, with plans to tie them all together into a depraved cinematic universe hell-bent on ruining the childhoods of millions.
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“We’re trying to connect the ways these stories could tie in together now; initially it’s just a character in another film looks at a map and sees One Hundred Acre Wood, or an animal becomes deformed and strange in the same way as Pooh.
“It’s not a branding exercise of saying “this is all the same universe”, but if there is demand, they will crossover down the line. There could be a Bambi Vs Pooh if the audience wants it…”
