Movies

'We were in hysterics': The behind-the-scenes story of viral sensation Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey

How a beloved children's character became the villain of one of 2023's must-see slashers.

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Published on February 9, 2023 01:00PM EST

Filmmaker Rhys Frake-Waterfield grew up loving Winnie-the-Pooh.

"I reckon everyone did," says the 31-year-old Brit. "I remember getting played a lot of the cartoons and stuff when I was younger. He's appeared throughout my life. You always kind of hear about him, and he's always floating around in different areas, in merchandise and things like that."

Winnie the Pooh Blood and Honey — 'Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey'. ITN Studios/Jagged Edge Productions

These days, Frake-Waterfield has a new reason to feel fondly toward the honey-loving creation of writer A. A. Milne and illustrator E. H. Shepard. His horror film, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, posits a world in which the titular bear and his pal Piglet have become homicidal monsters.

After the project was announced last year, the micro-budgeted, star-free film became a viral sensation. When imdb.com released a list of 2023's most-anticipated films, Frake-Waterfield's movie placed second, below Barbie but above Killers of the Flower Moon, Oppenheimer, and The Little Mermaid. Last month, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey opened in Mexico, where the film cracked the box-office top five. The movie will be released in nearly 1500 theaters come Feb. 15.

"It's been getting this demand from all these other territories," says the director. "I've been getting messages from China, Russia, everywhere, asking for it."

The success of the film is doubly remarkable given that, until recently, Frake-Waterfield was toiling in a very different industry.

"I worked in corporate strategy for an energy company," he says. "I used to work on making the economic case for nuclear power stations. I did it eight or nine years. I made the decision that I wanted to do something different and try going into this industry, because I was having a lot of good ideas."

In 2020, Frake-Waterfield founded Jagged Edge Productions with another young filmmaker, Scott Jeffrey. Over the past couple of years, the pair have released a string of low budget movies, often horror films, like Frake-Waterfield's sci-fi movie The Area 51 Incident (Tagline: "Scream all you want") or the Jeffrey-directed Spider in the Attic (Tagline: "There's nothing itsy-bitsy about it").

The journey to the Hundred Acre Wood (a.k.a. a certain bear's fictional home) began at the start of 2022 when Frake-Waterfield learned that Milne and Shepard's 1926 book Winnie-the-Pooh, the collection of stories which introduced Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore, and Christopher Robin, had fallen into the public domain. This development meant he was able to feature the characters in a movie as long as he didn't ape their subsequent, famous representations in the Disney-produced animated shorts, shows, and features.

"We always want to pick something that's very hooky," says Frake-Waterfield of the films made by Jagged Edge. "We want to create a product which instantly stands out and when people see it they go: What the hell is that? I'm a massive horror fan. When I knew that was in the public domain, suddenly the sparks started flying. I was like, I'd love to see that. I'd love to see Winnie-the-Pooh as a horror. So we thought, okay, let's just go for it."

Frake-Waterfield set about writing a script which showed the consequences of Christopher Robin effectively abandoning his anthropomorphic friends after reaching adulthood.

"Christopher Robin met Pooh and friends when he was younger and is friends with them as he's growing up," he explains. "He's bringing them food, he's nurturing them, he's making sure they're alright, and they develop this close bond. Christopher has to go to college and he's no longer able to help his young friends survive. As they're becoming more and more feral, the food supply continues to decrease, and it gets to a point where they eat Eeyore in order to survive the harsh winter. The process of eating their friend has made them really mentally twisted. Christopher Robin comes back, later in life, trying to convince his wife that he's not insane and his friends are not imaginary. He goes searching for them, and he comes across them, and they're no longer anything like he remembered. And it becomes a bloodbath."

The filmmaker decided to depict the all-grown-up versions of Pooh and Piglet as large, menacing figures, partly to help give the film the vibe of a slasher movie and also to put distance between his depictions of the characters and Disney's animated versions.

"I tried to make sure I didn't go anywhere near Disney," says Frake-Waterfield. "Disney have their their own interpretation of Winnie the Pooh. We're not trying to copy their IP, we're not trying to take their brand or anything like that. I wanted to make something that was just so vastly different from them that you can barely tell they're linked, except by name. And I'm pretty sure that's what we've got now. If you saw the massive Winnie-the-Pooh we've got and then the tiny Disney version next to each other, no one's going to confuse the two."

The filmmaker admits it was initially tough to assemble a cast prepared to fulfill his vision.

"It was actually really hard," Frake-Waterfield recalls. "I had approached a bunch of other actors and [said], 'Would you like this role?' And they were like, 'What's the concept?' I told them and they were like, 'No, I don't want to do it.' [Laughs] It was the same with some of the crew. They don't know if it's going to do that well or if it just looks super silly. But I was really passionate about it. I was like, this has a lot of legs and I think this is going to do really well. And, yeah, I found some people who I thought were really good and also actually really liked the concept, thought it was really fun."

The director eventually gathered a cast which included Nikolai Leon as Christopher Robin, Chris Cordell as Piglet, and Craig David Dowsett as Pooh Bear.

"When I was casting for Pooh, I wanted him quite tall," says Frake-Waterfield. "Craig, he's over six foot, he's quite broad as well, so he's got a kind of Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees vibe to him. That's how I wanted Pooh to come across in this."

The filmmaker instructed his actors to tackle their roles with a straight face but admits there were times when even he was unable to hold back the laughter during the shoot.

"We did try and take it all very seriously," he says. "That was one of the directions I gave the actors. I was like, 'I don't want you to kind of treat this like it's going to be humorous, I want you to act like it's deadly serious. The humor is going to come in from the fact that it's Winnie-the-Pooh, you don't have to play into it. [But] everyone, crew and cast, were in hysterics a lot of the time about what was happening. When you're trying to direct a scary scene, and then you look to your right, and there is literally a six-foot-man in a Winnie-the-Pooh outfit listening to you, we would just start laughing at that point."

There was further weirdness to come when the project became a viral sensation after its existence was announced last May.

"Yeah, it was really surreal," says the director. "It went viral just based on the images. We actually put a lot of care into trying to make it look very cinematic and good, and not just a low-effort B-movie. Some films, when they do a concept like this, they just give no craps about the cinematography and it's just some guy in a really average suit. But we did try and make this as cinematic as possible. There was one particular image where we had the girl [actress Natasha Tosini] in the jacuzzi with Pooh and Piglet behind her and that's the one which spread everywhere. Overnight, it just went crazy. I got woken up about four a.m. by the other co-producer. He was like, 'Look at your phone!' Endless stories had been posted about it. I was like, Oh my God, this has gone crazy. I thought, okay, this might just fizzle out, but then it just kept on growing and growing. We released the trailer and people were like, this actually looks good. [Laughs] I think people were expecting a load of rubbish and they were like, this actually looks quite fun to watch. So from there we thought, Okay, let's do some reshoots, make this even better."

Rhys Frake-Waterfield poses for a photo on the red carpet during the premiere of "Winnie The Pooh Blood and Honey" at Cinepolis Artz on January 24, 2023 in Mexico City, Mexico. — Director Rhys Frake-Waterfield. Jaime Nogales/Medios y Media/Getty Images

That further investment was justified when Frake-Waterfield and his collaborators traveled to Mexico for the movie's world premiere.

"They went full-out," he says. "They had people dressed up as Winnie-the-Pooh, their advertising [department] had someone in the complete costume go into the President's palace there. Just loads of really strange but cool marketing approaches. There was a press junket, red carpet. Myself, the crew and cast, just had probably one of the best days of their lives there."

So Winnie-the-Pooh is big in Mexico?

"Pooh is everywhere," he says. "I went to see some of their ancient tourist sites, and even there there's people selling merchandise and little key rings, and I could see Winnie-the-Pooh. It just made me think, this is literally everywhere, this concept. Everybody knows what Winnie-the-Pooh is."

Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey hits theaters Feb. 15. Tickets can be purchased online at Fathom Events or at participating theater box offices. For a complete list of theater locations, visit the Fathom Events website.

See the trailer for Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey below and exclusively watch a clip from the movie above.