How Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey Became a Viral Hit, and Why It’s Just the Beginning

If you thought you were surprised to find out that there’s a brutal Winnie the Pooh slasher out there, just imagine how shocked Blood and Honey writer/director Rhys Frake-Waterfield was to find out that it had gone mega-viral just hours after its existence was revealed online.

The prolific independent filmmaker got a text from his co-producer at 4 a.m. after the movie was announced last May, taking the internet by storm with its chilling and bizarre premise of a beloved childhood character being turned into a murderous monster. 

“I was in this storm when that was happening, because I didn’t expect it at all. Like, no one would,” he tells IGN. “And then, yeah, when I sat down I was like, ‘This is mental. This is insane, this has actually gone this viral.’ “

The movie went so viral that it even secured a wide theatrical release for Feb. 15, with ambitions to be the next micro-budget horror hit. Given the buzz that it’s already generated, Frake-Waterfield thinks it was “worth taking the risk,” and it’s hard to argue with him; a sequel, after all, has already been greenlit.

He sat down with IGN for a long chat about his ambitions to turn even more childhood characters into nightmares, how he worked with his shoe-string budget, and what’s even so terrifying about Winnie the Pooh to begin with.

Pulling From the Source

As expected, this whole endeavor started when Frake-Waterfield and Scott Jeffrey, his co-producer at London-based horror production studio Jagged Edge, noticed that ol’ Pooh Bear had gone into public domain. 

“We’re always trying to come up with interesting hooks and concepts which really stand out, just because there’s so many, in the horror space, monsters, werewolves, zombies,” he says. “You’ve seen it all before.”

But, uh, why Winnie the Pooh? Frake-Waterfield acknowledges they could’ve taken countless different angles, like “Cinderella, maybe Wizard of Oz, or something like that.” 

“But none of them, to me, had that same…it didn’t develop that same sort of interest, and I don’t feel as excited when I’d hear about a horror movie of one of those stories” Frake-Waterfield says.

Pooh, he realized, had this “X factor” — or, at least, the idea of “transforming him into some six-foot killer with a bit of a strange face” did. Still, he realized this bizarre idea would also be a huge risk: “It could have bombed.”

“We’re always trying to come up with interesting hooks and concepts which really stand out.

Deciding it was a risk he wanted to take, he grabbed the directing reins and took the pitch to their distributor ITN Studios, who co-financed the film with the production studio. Then came the next question: figuring out what he actually could adapt from the Winnie the Pooh canon.

The answer, it turns out, is pretty simple: because of rights issues, the director made a point to only pull from A.A. Milne’s classic 1926 children’s book that originated the character. That’s why one of the most iconic of Pooh’s friends, Tigger, isn’t in Blood and Honey: he wasn’t present in the 1926 novel and thus, is still under copyright at Disney.

“You can’t have [Pooh] in a red shirt. You can’t have him saying, ‘Oh, bother,’ “ he says. “They can’t play Pooh Sticks, blah, blah, blah.”

That said, there was still plenty that Frake-Waterfield could pull from. The movie takes place in the Hundred Acre Wood and the movie was actually shot around the Ashtown Forest, the location that inspired Milne’s creation of the fictional woods. And, as you might guess from the title, Pooh still loves honey, which the director calls a little bit of “fan service.” 

“Even though that’s a bit silly and it’s a bit goofy, I thought people might like it,” Frake-Waterfield says.

Even bees are still involved in Pooh’s love of the sticky substance — but, of course, in a more nefarious way in Blood and Honey (Warning: Slight spoiler in the paragraph below).

“Sometimes they’re his little scouts,” he says of the bees. “They’ll go off and they’ll try and spot a girl in a jacuzzi for him to kill and run over her head. So that happens in the film. You see a little bee go up to her, realize she’s there, and then fly back to Winnie, and then he comes, and then she dies.”

Warped Relationships

Despite losing Tigger to copyright, there were plenty of other characters Frake-Waterfield could use, namely Christopher Robin, Piglet, and Eeyore. Although, Eeyore is not actually in the movie for a particularly grim reason: Pooh and Piglet, having been abandoned by Christopher after he goes to college, begin to run low on resources and food in the forest in the winter. Driven to desperation, they eat Eeyore.

“That’s when they have this conflicting change in their mentality, where they were once pets who were loved and looked after and nurtured, and they built up this very happy side, because everything was wonderful in their life at that point,” he says. “There was this sudden harsh change when Christopher left, and they’ve resorted back to being more animalistic and feral. And that’s created a resentment in them, because now they hate Christopher. They blame humanity and Christopher for them being in this situation.”

It’s that conflict that drives the emotional throughline of the story — and yes, before you laugh, there is an emotional throughline that drives Blood and Honey. Despite their resentment, Frake-Waterfield says Christopher is the only person that Pooh and Piglet have some hesitance to murder. Everyone else, he says, is “just meat.”

“There was this sudden harsh change when Christopher left, and they’ve resorted back to being more animalistic.

“I thought that was a really interesting dynamic to integrate, because it’s like a pet,” he says. “Like, if you have a pet and you love it, they’ll love you back. But then if you abandon them, or mistreated them, they’re going to have this conflicting mindset, where one side of them loves you and remembers loads of the good times. The other side is, you abandoned them. And I thought that was an interesting kind of dynamic between the two. It’s like, what’s winning? Do they hate him more than they love him from their past memories, and how would that play out in the film?”

There’s also the dynamic between Pooh and Piglet, which Frake-Waterfield says he tried to adapt from the 1926 book in some ways. Pooh, as the director puts it, was “always the commander,” whereas Piglet mostly followed him around. Blood and Honey, he says, largely keeps to that same dynamic, aided by the fact that Pooh is bigger and more menacing than his bestie. Basically, Piglet’s the “grunt,” or “henchman,” as Frake-Waterfield calls it.

“At one point in the film you see [Piglet] riding a bike, and he’s riding the bike to generate the electricity to run some lights in their den, so Pooh can eat his honey,” he says. “So he’s always doing the laborer side of the work.”

Bearing the Challenges

Even with a good grasp on the rights and story, Frake-Waterfield faced one very significant problem: a shoestring budget. An exact number has yet to be revealed, but Frake-Waterfield notes that it was less than what it cost to make Terrifier 2, last year’s surprise horror hit that made $14 million on a minimal $250k budget.

“When you don’t have much budget and you want to make a horror film like this, you need to be super careful on everything,” he says. “The costume, the look of the creature, the locations, the amount of time you have for the death scenes, how many special effects you can have, and you need to make compromises on a lot of different areas in order to allocate resources in the best way possible.”

One area Frake-Waterfield didn’t want to make a lot of compromises in were the death scenes, because hey, why else do you go see a Winnie the Pooh slasher? He also revealed that, once they realized how big Blood and Honey was getting online, he went back to their investors at ITN and got more money for reshoots.

“We knew it was going to go so global at that point, that we wanted it to be as good of a film as we could, which is why we pushed the release from roughly Halloween into [this] week,” he adds.

“I don’t want people deadly silent watching this and thinking that it’s accidentally funny.

Budget wasn’t the only problem. Another looming issue was whether it actually was possible to take a Winnie the Pooh horror movie seriously. Frake-Waterfield, for what it’s worth, is in on the jokes; he points out that he’s kept up with the memes and TikToks, and that he’s got “loads” saved.

But striking that balance between horror and humor, he says, “was actually really hard.” He knew, though, that he didn’t want to commit fully to just one end of the spectrum, especially given what he was working with.

“When people are buying a ticket, they’re knowingly going in to watch Winnie the Pooh holding a knife attacking people,” he laughs. “That’s ridiculous. It’s already ridiculous. The second you’ve got that ticket in your hand and you’re about to sit down, I feel like you are expecting ridiculous things to happen.”

Still, in addition to the gags and satire — among them Pooh actually whipping Christopher with Eeyore’s tail — there’s still the gore, and there’s still some seriousness. The more serious moments, he says, are in the story-driven scenes, like one where Pooh has flashbacks to his younger years.

That said, Frake-Waterfield makes it clear: he gets the shock and humor. Even he’s seen certain shots and asked himself, “What have I made?”

“I want people to sit there at points and laugh at it,” he says. “I don’t want people deadly silent watching this and thinking that it’s accidentally funny. It was intended at points to be fun and make you smile.”

What Horror Is Next?

This won’t be the last we see of Frake-Waterfield’s grotesque vision of Pooh, as a sequel has already been greenlit. But he notes that he hasn’t gotten too far into writing it yet, as he’s specifically waiting for fan feedback after Blood and Honey releases wide. 

He expects to be “inundated” with messages after February 15, when moviegoers have gotten a chance to see his creation. And hey, if you’re one of the people messaging him, you might just be interrogated a little; Frake-Waterfield plans on asking viewers what they liked about it, and then taking all that research for a “helicopter view” of how to steer the sequel in the right direction.

“I’ve already got ideas in my mind, and I think I know what’s right,” he says. “I just want to make sure that I’m not disregarding people’s views and thinking I must be right. I’m just going to take that on board and make sure we deliver what they want.”

He’s also, unsurprisingly, hoping to get a bit more money this time around, should the first movie be the low-budget hit the distributor is banking on.

“We are doing a load of these, like, IP-driven concepts, and other fairy tales, and nursery rhymes.

But his plans go far behind everyone’s favorite honey addict. He confirms his next project will likely be Bambi: The Reckoning, a previously announced bloody take on the poor baby deer, and he says the team’s got about 65-70 pages of that script done. Peter Pan: Neverland Nightmare is also in the works, but he admits it’s “not that far into development at the moment,” although he has an idea of the story he wants to take on.

Frake-Waterfield also notes that other studios have approached him about potentially directing a movie for them. While vague on the details, when asked if those projects might involve twisting other innocent IP on its head, he says yes.

“I love doing these retellings,” he says. “They’re so unique and so different and so exciting that that’s the sort of area I want to stay in… We are doing a load of these, like, IP-driven concepts, and other fairy tales, and nursery rhymes, and trying to find out the right ones to twist into this horror vibe.”

Of course, there’s a challenge in that not all of the projects Frake-Waterfield would take on are in the public domain like Winnie the Pooh is, and not all rights-holders are eager to license out their properties for such gory content. But, thanks to Blood and Honey, Frake-Waterfield is dealing with “a whole new world” now, where additional funds and going through a studio might make those rights-holders see things differently.

And the director already has a dream project… even if he admits it’s a long shot.

“Something which has been floating around my mind the last three months is the Teletubbies,” he says. “I think I have zero chance with it, but the Teletubbies are weird. I have always found them really, really strange, and they look alien, and they look really odd. And I think there’s something you could do with them to make them creepy as hell.”

Hey, you never know: maybe we’ll be getting some killer Teletubbies next.

Alex Stedman is a News Editor for IGN, overseeing entertainment reporting. When she’s not writing or editing, you can find her reading fantasy novels or playing Dungeons & Dragons.