It’s been a while since news broke that Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, the upcoming horror movie featuring a silly old bear on a killing spree, would be a thing. Up to this point, most of the reactions have been bemusement or excitement by horror fans and people who just think the idea is absurd. The film has had fans howling when it was first announced, which happened almost immediately after Winnie-the-Pooh fell into the public domain earlier this year. The earliest of A.A. Milne’s stories about the beloved childhood characters are now free for anybody to use, or reimagine, as they see fit — and filmmaker Rhys Frake-Waterfield sees it as a tale of terror. But now that there’s a trailer, the first wave of really negative reactions are hitting social media.
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With many users quoting a news story that calls the trailer “disgusting,” there are hundreds of angry comments, which range from blaming society and social media, to blaming Disney for not stopping the film from happening. Of course, that’s outside of Disney’s purview, because the characters of Pooh and Piglet themselves are now public domain, and Disney only owns the modifications and unique details created for their versions of the characters.
Tigger, though, remains copyrighted, and will not appear. So we’ll have to wait another couple of years for that inevitably bloody installment in the franchise.
In the trailer, audiences meet Christopher Robin, whose abandonment of Pooh and his friends in the 100-Acre Wood seemingly sets the stage for the massacre that follows. It seems that a thirst for vengeance is what motivates Pooh and Piglet to lose their minds, and that Christopher Robin himself is one of the teens being stalked in what looks like a Strangers-style slasher movie with a Winnie-the-Pooh twist.
“No one is going to mistake this [for Disney],” Waterfield said a few months ago. “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.”
You can see some of the many frustrated, angry, and confused reactions below.
