After solely 5 months of Winnie The Pooh’s lapse into the general public area, a person had each made a whole horror movie from the character, and begun that movie’s launch technique. That man is UK filmmaker Rhys Frake-Waterfield, who till lately labored for an electrical energy provider whereas making micro-budget horror movies on the aspect. Now, on the again of his directorial debut, Waterfield is answerable for what might flip to be one in all this yr’s most worthwhile movie releases. Initially meant as a streaming launch with a single-day theatrical exhibiting within the US, now, on the again of its poster and trailer’s surprising on-line virality, the movie is being rolled out in cinemas internationally. In Mexico, the place the movie obtained its international premiere on 29 January, the movie went to quantity 4 on the field workplace in its first week, taking in a reported $700,000. (Waterfield hasn’t disclosed the movie’s particular price range, although indicated in a latest interview with Selection that it was made on lower than $100,000). These are good omens for this week’s launch within the US, the place it’s screening in additional than 1,500 theatres.
The genesis of a weird thought
Alongside Scott Jeffrey, a frequent collaborator in addition to the movie’s producer, Waterfield had been “attempting to provide you with concepts that hadn’t been finished earlier than”, one thing “extraordinarily completely different and unusual”, he tells BBC Tradition. “What fairytales and monsters are there that we will twist in a unique course? Or change one thing that was by no means a monster right into a monster? That sounded actually attention-grabbing and funky.”.
As quickly as Waterfield realised that Pooh had lapsed into the general public area within the US, he started racking his mind for concepts.
Waterfield had additionally observed a surfeit of over-serious horror movies within the present panorama; elevated horror, like The Babadook or Men which deployed “metaphors” as their bogeymen – movies that, as The Guardian’s AA Dowd wrote last year, “try, loudly and unsubtly, to be about one thing scarier than a pointy knife or sharp fangs, one thing actual and necessary”. Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, then again, strives to be nothing however a slasher movie starring Winnie The Pooh and a few buddies. The movie, which is reliant on well-trodden slasher tropes all through (suppose: an invincible villain on an unbending vendetta; enticing girls in bikinis coming to an unlucky finish) will not precisely transfer the style ahead, although it is good, easy, bloody enjoyable all the identical.
Waterfield’s first challenge: the right way to make Winnie The Pooh scary? “Then, I in a short time bought the concept the movie’s major theme could be abandonment,” Waterfield says. Blood and Honey opens with a now-adult Christopher Robin returning to the Hundred Acre Wooden, a few years after departing it for school. There, he finds his as soon as domesticated buddies Winnie the Pooh and Piglet turned feral; scavenging for flesh, blood and drool hanging from their muzzles, able to go on a killing spree, and in the end wreak revenge upon Robin for abandoning all of them these years in the past.
