Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey – the upcoming horror movie based on the out-of-copyright book characters – will see Winnie and Piglet on a murderous rampage after, well, eating Eeyore.
During an interview with Variety, director Rhys Frake-Waterfield discussed the plot of the upcoming horror adaptation, which has swept social media in the last few days. Blood and Honey features Pooh and Piglet as “the main villains… going on a rampage” after Christopher Robin abandons them to go to college.
“Christopher Robin is pulled away from them, and he’s not [given] them food, it’s made Pooh and Piglet’s life quite difficult,” he explained. “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.”
“When you try and do a film like this, and it’s a really wacky concept, it’s very easy to go down a route where nothing is scary and it’s just really ridiculous and really, like, stupid,” he said. “And we wanted to go between the two.”
Essentially, the film will balance horror and comedy, fully aware of its absurd premise. As an example, the director explained one of the film stills (in the gallery above) that shows the pair stalking a victim in a jacuzzi.
“She’s having a good time and then Pooh and Piglet appear behind her, chloroform her, take her out of the jacuzzi and then kind of drive a car over her head,” he revealed. “It’s scary but there’s also funny bits because there’s shots of Winnie the Pooh in a car and seeing him with his little ears behind the wheel and like slowly going over there [to kill her.],
The director revealed that other characters, such as Tigger, would not appear in the movie. Essentially, it’s down to the copyright – Tigger, among others, is still under copyright, and so is not in the public domain. Eeyore could be in the movie, but it turns out we’ll simply be seeing the donkey’s tombstone, as his former friends ate him. Yep.
Frake-Waterfield promises there’s no way Disney fans will confuse this production for anything Disney could or would make: “No one is going to mistake this [for Disney], he said. “When you see the cover for this and you see the trailers and the stills and all that, there’s no way anyone is going to think this is a child’s version of it.”
Further avoiding copyright issues, the team had to ensure that even Pooh and Piglet are only based on the 1926 version of Winnie the Pooh in Milne’s stories. After all, Disney still retains the rights to its own interpretations of the characters.
“We’ve tried to be extremely careful,” he explained. “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.” That’s why Pooh is wearing a lumberjack suit while Piglet is clad in black.
