Filmmaker Rhys Frake-Waterfield’s directorial debut—released on February 15—is a Winnie-the-Pooh story unlike any other. It begins when Christopher Robin, no longer a boy in Mary Janes but a cardigan-wearing university graduate, returns to the Hundred Acre Wood to introduce his fiancée to his childhood friends. But the friends have fared poorly. Without him to provide for them, they’ve turned hungry and feral. Piglet is now tusked and fearsome, like a full-sized boar. Eeyore has had his pessimistic worldview cruelly vindicated: we see the headstone of his makeshift grave. And Pooh, it seems, has lost interest in his old pursuits, like writing doggerel poetry or throwing sticks in a river. These days, he’d rather kill. The film is called Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, and it’s a slasher.
Within the Pooh canon, the movie stands out, but conceptually, it’s pretty derivative. The original slasher classics from the ’70s—Black Christmas, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Halloween—were atmospheric and meandering, concerned less with violence than with the world-destroying dread induced by the threat of violence. Since then, few slashers have measured up. In short order, the genre became consumed by the quest for novelty, with producers dreaming up new gimmicks—a killer in a hockey mask, a killer in a slicker, a killer disguised as a wax dummy—and then finding ever-more-garish ways to brutalize victims. (In the third instalment of the Final Destination series, two characters are cooked to death in tanning beds, because sooner or later someone had to put that on film.)
