Into the Poohniverse: Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 

The Twisted Childhood Universe, or Poohniverse, is a collection of movies where wonderful, colourful, and, most importantly, public domain children’s characters kill people. 

The brainchild of British filmmaker Rhys Frake-Waterford, the cinematic universe is populated (and will be populated by) characters like Winnie the Pooh, Peter Pan, Pinochino, Bambi, and Mary Poppins among others. All given a dark makeover and murderous intent.

Into the Poohniverse is Film Inquiry’s look at these movies as the cinematic universe expands and the death toll rises. 

Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 

The only reliable genre is horror. Every year at least one horror movie is released that is some kind of game changer whether it’s for a filmmaker’s career, a type of subgenre, or at the box office.

In 2024 it was Longlegs, a movie which made 126 million dollars from a 10 million dollar budget and firmly put Osgood Perkins on the map as a filmmaker to watch. In years before we had Get Out, The Babadook, Green Room, It Follows, and the Terrifier trilogy, and that’s only the last ten years. 

Movies like Halloween and The Blair Witch Project burst onto the scene, taking existing ideas and pushing them to their limits, and did it on shoestring budgets, which yielded huge box offices. And a lot of directors have dipped their toe or fully submerged themselves in the genre, never looking down on it the way some librarians can’t bring themselves to classify Stephen King as literature. 

The newest horror subgenre that’s getting a workout is taking public domain characters and giving them a horrific spin. Multiple horror movies about Steamboat Willie and Popeye the Sailor Man, as well as The Grinch and the Banana Splits, have all come out to mixed responses from critics and “I had a pretty good time” responses from audiences. 

Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey is the most financially successful of these movies and the first in an envisioned multi-movie spanning franchise. 

The movie’s opening is a wonderful animated sequence depicting Pooh and friends as roughly sketched abominations of half-animal, half-people who are befriended and cared for by a young Christopher Robin. When Robin has to leave them to go to college, they can’t fend for themselves, leading to a harrowing scene of them deciding to eat one of their own. 

From there, we go to live action as Robin returns with his fiancee to introduce her to Pooh. Things don’t go well. 

These opening scenes are indicative of the whole movie. When there’s action or horror, the movie feels solid and well-made. When it’s just characters talking or trying to act scared, it begins to fray at the seams. The opening is creeping around and getting killed, and it’s solid. But once the Robin stuff is out of the way, the real plot begins with Maria (Maria Taylor) and a group of her friends going to an Airbnb in the woods, where Pooh and Piglet have made their hunting grounds. 

The catalyst for the trip is Maria needing a break after an experience with a stalker. This side plot feels added for two reasons: to add a scary flashback and to explain why Maria has a gun. The flashback with the stalker is legitimately creepy but feels too realistic an experience for a young woman to have in a movie about a killer Winnie-the-Pooh. It also never quite pays off as the gun is used once, and ineffectively so in the end, the stalker stuff is just padding out the movie to its 84 minute runtime. 

That is an issue with all of Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, in that it all feels like a first draft. Plotlines go nowhere, continuity errors happen from scene to scene (e.g. Christopher is with his fiancee in one scene then calls her his wife in the next), and dialogue is stilted or contains repetition (e.g. Maria tells a story and keeps saying “And then one night…”). There are also moments when it feels as though coverage hasn’t been shot for certain sections or sound is missing as characters react to things we don’t see or hear. In the beginning, Robin and his wife/fiancee find a picture of him drawn by Pooh and react horrified, but we aren’t shown the image as though the filmmakers forgot to film that scene. 

The stalker plotline feels like a whiteboard answer for the question: how do we get the girls into the woods? And then they’ve overcomplicated it. Instead, just make it a girl’s trip or a bachelorette party or a birthday or something. 

However, when the kills come, they come strong. There’s very little time between kills and the movie finds creative ways to introduce more characters to dispatch in fun and gory ways. In that way, it’s quite similar to the first Terrifer where the character stuff isn’t that strong when compared to the murder scenes where it feels like a lot of the budget, work, and love has gone. 

The set design work in Blood and Honey is great and I was especially taken with the camp that Pooh and Piglet lived in. Treehouses and airstream trailers around a bonfire.It was like an upmarket glamping site except for the skulls littered about and jars of dripping blood and honey. It was a wonderful setting and the movie smartly found ways to get characters back to that set to be killed. 

Unfortunately, the first draft-ness of the whole thing lets it down. The main characters keep stating their intentions even though they’re obvious, they move too slow, talk too loud, and wait too long before attacking. Some of them also struggle with the acting challenge of seeming scared, which is a biggie for a horror movie. 

However, a lot of this feels on par for a first feature, especially a low budget horror feature. Terrifier and The Evil Dead have some small shonky moments, but they deliver where it counts, and while Blood and Honey does not deliver as well as those two, it is still an enjoyable beer-and-pizza midnight movie. It just suffers from that thing when the highs aren’t high enough to justify the lows. A lot of horror movies lose momentum when it’s the character stuff, as sometimes you’re just waiting for the next death scene. The problem with Blood and Honey is that those low momentum scenes stop the movie dead in its tracks.

As an exercise in something weird and creative using the public domain IP, Blood and Honey mostly works. It takes the Pooh mythology and rewrites it in a way that is twisted and unsettling but still hews close enough to the original that it is recognisable as the stories we know from our childhoods. 

Perhaps in their haste to be the first ones out with a Winnie-the-Pooh movie, the filmmakers unfortunately skimped on the writing for the non-Pooh characters, leaving them lifeless and feeling fake. I never felt connected to any of the characters, so their deaths meant nothin,g which is not the worst thing a horror movie can do, but when they’re killing off 10+ characters, you want to be invested in at least one of them. 

And in conclusion, I guess my biggest question is when did Winnie-the-Pooh learn how to drive a car?