[REVIEW] Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey

It’s hard to imagine that Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey could be any further from the vision A.A. Milne had for his characters in the Hundred Acre Wood when he created them in 1926. Now that the characters are in the public domain, however, it didn’t take long for writer/director Rhys Frake-Waterfield to bring the children’s tale to its inevitable, horrifying conclusion.

In Frake-Waterfield’s reimagining, Pooh and friends aren’t stuffed toys, but abominable half-human creatures taking shelter in the wood, away from the scornful eyes of man. Christopher Robin (Nikolai Leon), befriends the beasts and spends his whole childhood with them, until the day he leaves for college. Unfortunately, he had unwittingly forced the animals to become dependent 3.02on him over the years and, during a harsh winter, they go mad with hunger, forcing them to cannibalize Eeyore and vow vengeance, not just on Christopher Robin, but on all of humanity.

Following this brief introduction, the film plays out following a fairly standard slasher format, and for the most part, succeeds. Pooh and Piglet stray beyond their Hundred-Acre lair, terrorizing a group of women with regrettably minimal characterization, other than to act as fodder for the bloodthirsty mutants. Their dialogue is repetitive and feels ad-libbed. There are scenes of inexplicably fake CGI gore. But Blood and Honey knows exactly what its goal is. The sole entertainment value is seeing monstrous versions of nostalgic characters stand in for Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees as they rip and tear their way through the story.

Why is this concept—creating “adult” versions of childhood stories—so attractive to some and so repulsive to others? Repulsive enough, in fact, to apparently warrant death threats levied against Frake-Waterfield for betraying the Pooh characters they loved so dearly. This corrupting of nostalgia isn’t new to Blood and Honey, though I’d argue that it’s a uniquely millennial phenomenon, starting, not on the big screen, but in the annals of online forums like Reddit and 4chan, when fans began circulating disturbing theories about their favorite 90s and 00s cartoons. Take, for instance, the theory concerning Nickelodeon’s Rugrats that argues that all of the babies, except Angelica, are dead and only continue to exist in her imagination. Or Cartoon Network’s Ed, Edd n Eddy, in which a popular theory says all of its characters have died over a period of decades and are now in purgatory. SpongeBob and his pals live at the bottom of Bikini Atoll, where the U.S. government conducted dozens of nuclear bomb tests. Ash Ketchum of Pokemon was electrocuted in the first episode and spends the rest of the series in a coma-induced dream-state. Search any popular cartoon from Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network’s golden age, and you’ll almost certainly find a twisted theory behind it.  

That’s not to say that Pooh is the only character unlucky enough to get the treatment on the silver screen, though. Snow White: A Tale of Terror (1997), Tale of Tales (2015), and Gretel & Hansel (2020) are only a few examples of fairy tales gone rogue in modern films. Where Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey differs from these is in its willingness to disregard its source completely, importing the characters and setting into a wholly new format—the slasher. This isn’t a grown-up retelling of Winnie-the-Pooh so much as it is Friday the 13th with storybook characters. And in an age where we throw around words like “elevated” and “arthouse” to describe our horror movies, Blood and Honey seems to be as much a reaction to The Lighthouse as it is to the Walt Disney Company. It’s an attempted reset—a reminder that horror can be ridiculous and silly and fun. 

But did it have to be Pooh? The unnecessary subversion of our childhood memories, upsetting as it can be, is, in fact, its own kind of rebellion. It’s hard for us to ignore the lost futures that hover over us every time we turn on the news. Time and time again, we are told that ours is the first generation expected to be worse off than our parents. Those same generations that exploited the generous economic policies of their days now work to close off those programs for their children’s children, and so we lashed out at the television shows that we still love, but know were ultimately created to placate us as kids. By corrupting our own nostalgia, we’re better able to articulate the anxieties we feel about our futures and the futures of our own children. 

Whether or not Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey succeeds at these goals is up to each viewer. There is no deception in the marketing—it is exactly the kind of movie it claims to be and nothing more. It doesn’t have the well-written jokes or the physical gags you might expect from a full-on horror comedy, but it leans into its irreverent charm just enough to let you appreciate it in the way you might appreciate Leprechaun 3. If, however, you take your Pooh fandom seriously, you can skip this movie and be comforted by the fact that it’ll soon fade from the headlines. That is, at least until production begins on the planned sequel.