‘Peter Pan’ Is Getting His First Horror Movie
If you want to see just how valuable a great high concept is, take a look at the low-budget horror film Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey. It was made on a shoestring, but it’s garnered enormous attention online thanks to its eye-catching premise: A dark retelling of the classic Winnie-the-Pooh stories (which, fortunate for the movie, are now in the public domain) as a scary movie, with a grown Christopher Robin returning to the Hundred Acre Wood to find a Pooh who has taken being abandoned by his childhood friend very badly.
After trailers for the movie racked up millions of views online, the little film from director Rhys Frake-Waterfield is getting released in theaters around the world. Fathom Events will show the film in U.S. multiplexes on February 15, while other countries will get even more expansive theatrical releases.
And that’s not all, now that he’s stumbled on this bankable concept of horror-izing childhood favorites, Frake-Waterfield is working on making more of them. According to The Hollywood Reporter, he’s at work on a sequel to Blood and Honey as well as a second “twisted take on a children’s tale with Peter Pan: Neverland Nightmare.
If you haven’t seen the Blood and Honey trailer yet, well, you’re missing out. Here it is:
There are a seemingly endless number of these beloved childhood icons whose original works are slipping out of copyright (or could be parodied in a different enough way that you could probably get away with spoofing them in a horror context). If Blood and Honey’s release goes well, we could be in for many, many more movies like it.