Horror films provide paradoxical feelings of fear and fun, offering ways of navigating societal darkness while simultaneously giving us humorous delight. In the case of, Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey (Rhys Frake-Waterfield, 2023), it punches up toward Disney IP and punches down on marginalized audiences. However, the film ultimately spends far more time doing the latter, with its violence and aggression squarely trained on women. Any attempt to speak back to larger forms of power—like Disney’s draconian use and expansion of intellectual property law to protect its economic interests to the detriment of creativity and play—ultimately becomes a fig leaf for what this film really wants to do: dehumanize, sexualize, and punish women.
These recent installments of “fun horror” tend to have enjoyable and comical storylines while embracing absurdity. They might even shy away from delivering a clear satirical message. Enter Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, featuring Pooh, Piglet, and Christopher Robin. Darkly reimagining Disney characters in a fun way, the film is both satisfying and disturbing. However, it also provides an opportunity to question the slasher subgenre’s subversive potential. When we view horror as purely “for fun” what do we lose?
The joy of the film comes from the absurd transformation of Pooh from a “tubby little cubby stuffed with fluff” to a sadistic serial killer stuffed with abandonment issues. The film begins as Christopher Robin sets out to revisit his old friends Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore, Rabbit, and Owl in the Hundred Acre Wood with his new fiancé.
In flashback, the last time Christopher Robin saw his friends was many years ago prior to attending college. He provided their only source of food when he visited, and, when he left, his old friends starved. As almost a decade went by, his anthropomorphic friends resorted to eating Eeyore to survive. After this first dose of donkey death, they begin to butcher and consume any people who step foot in their woods. Abandoned by Christopher Robin, the group grows to resent humans as they turn back into animals. Oh, bother.
Pooh the killer
The plot is absurd. It is part of what could have made the film fun and silly. Contextually, the film also provides elements of fun as its very existence critiques Disney’s seriousness over their intellectual properties. In the US, copyright protections have incrementally increased due to Disney’s intensive lobbying efforts to preserve its control over Mickey Mouse. Ironically, some of the stories they routinely fight to maintain are works Disney took from the public domain, or were otherwise purchased. For a little under one hundred years, the Hundred Acre Woods has been under copyright. As of January 1, 2022, the rights for the original first book of stories Winnie-the-Pooh (1926), from British author A.A. Milne, moved into the public domain. Disney still has a hold on copyright and trademark for certain adaptations of Winnie-the-Pooh, like the title with the hyphens in the bear’s name and the image of the bear with his iconic red shirt. But what if the red on his shirt was actually just blood spatter?
With Winnie the Pooh as a serial killer, Disney’s reign over their materials ends quite brutally. So far it’s an inauspicious start, as other Disney properties enter the public domain. But who knows what the currently in-production Bambi and Peter Pan horror films will bring. And we’ll have to wait even longer for Steam Boat Willy (Steam Boat Kill Me?), which doesn’t enter the public domain until 2024.
The praise for Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey is dismal, and it scores a whopping 8% fresh from critics and 50% from audiences on Rotten Tomatoes. The criticisms of Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey range from claims it ruins childhoods to calling out its misogynistic depictions. And, indeed, while the film provides many interesting kills and gory scenes, the fun stops with the overly grotesque abuse these creatures inflict on women. The misogynistic history of horror is important to the film’s lineage, but horror film in general has developed in ways that better illustrate women’s stories, particularly through the lens of trauma. Over the past few years, we have seen the success of horror films that depict overcoming or understanding trauma, dubbed “trauma horror,” with films like Hereditary (2018), Midsommar (2019), Last Night in Soho (2021), Smile (2022), Nope (2022), and Halloween Ends (2022). Seemingly opposed to this trauma constellation is an emergent cycle embracing fun, camp, or goofiness, with Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022), M3GAN (2022), Cocaine Bear (2023), and Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey (2023). However, Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey is a derivative and regressive entry in the slasher genre.
In the film, women are not only murdered but murdered quite brutally. In one scene, Tina, a member of all-women friend group vacationing at an Airbnb near the Hundred Acre Wood, is lost trying to find her friends. After Pooh runs her down, he rips off her shirt. A close-up shot lingers on her breasts as he smashes her head into a meat grinder before subsequently shoving her down the chute, pulverizing her body. Any concern Pooh had for mixing cotton fibers in his sausage apparently doesn’t extend to the rest of her clothes, which remained on her body. The scene doesn’t play as ridiculous or absurd, but sexually exploitative.
Another victim, Lara, ostensibly deserves her sexualized death because she is one-dimensional and superficial. Obsessed with her phone, her looks, and taking selfies, she is portrayed as a girl who just wants to have fun. Tied up and gagged in her bathing suit to invoke BDSM imagery, she is run over by Pooh, who insinuates she was asking for it. The suggestion that this film is “fun” definitely neglects its misogyny.
Winnie the Pooh’s “fun” misogyny
Horror has been long critiqued for the brutalization of women, especially within the slasher genre, though it has also offered opportunities for women to survive her would-be killer and enact revenge. As Carol Clover notes in her landmark critique of gender and the horror film, the “final girl” is a woman who survives her trauma. However, in Pooh, Maria, the head of her friend group and the woman who would ordinarily become the final girl, dies. The problem is not the refusal of the final girl trope but the way the film brutalizes women without redemption or empathy toward the kills. In act one, we learn that the reason Maria and her friends were vacationing in the woods was due to her therapist’s suggestion that time away would help her heal from recent trauma related to sexual harassment and stalking. Although the film—and slasher genre expectations around the final girl—sets up audiences to presume she will find ways to resolve her trauma, she just dies a sensationalized and pointless death, in a haphazard and lackluster way. Although her death is not as brutal as the others, Pooh kills her swiftly and mercilessly. In the context of trauma horror, her back story becomes a grotesque gag on the audience, treated with utter thoughtlessness.
Maria (in red) and her friends
Women getting murdered in a slasher is not surprising, but how they are killed in Winnie the Pooh is deeply disturbing, especially in connection with the narrative that attempted to explore women’s trauma. The juxtaposition between the absurdity and the brutality was evident in the theater, as I saw people initially laughing and giggling at the silly sight of Pooh’s killer super strength, but then quickly becoming silent at the way the scenes overtly brutalized and sexualized women.
Simply put, the horror presented in Winnie the Pooh is salacious, not subversive. At first, watching Pooh’s unexpressive silicon mask and his willingness to decapitate, pummel and crush the bodies of his victims offered a fun juxtaposition of beloved childhood IP and ostensibly adult themes. However, as it became clear that this was a bear that had scented an opportunity to victimize women and mock their trauma while claiming hipster coolness, the film became increasingly hard to watch. And it seems this will become a horror franchise that will continue to haunt us, as a sequel is in the works. The director, Rhys Frake-Waterfield, was interviewed by Variety saying, “I know what we can really do with the second, and how we can make it even more fun and goofy.” If this film is any indication of his future plans, it perversely misses what makes horror successful: extreme empathy.
The crux of the problem with this new “fun horror” genre is that “fun” becomes an excuse for directors to produce regressive tropified characters and content that refuses to be taken “seriously” because it is just for “fun.” Ultimately, as much pleasure as I received from Mickey Mouse and Disney receiving a big middle finger, I also wanted more from the story, the characters, and the plot.
So, is Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey a good movie? No. But do I want to see more liberties taken on content in the public domain? Absolutely. Watching Pooh as a monstrous bloodthirsty, honey-dripping, “silly ol’ bear,” slashing Christopher Robin and vicariously Disney, was sweet revenge, but not for everyone, and especially not, it seems, for women.
Riana Slyter is a communication studies Ph.D. student with an emphasis on film and media studies at Colorado State University. As a horror scholar, she analyzes representations of gender and sexuality on film and television and how horror influences haunted attraction spaces and the Halloween industries at large.
