Maybe Not Every Public Domain Character Needs a Horror Film?

Maybe Not Every Public Domain Character Needs Their Own Horror Film?

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As Paste’s longtime resident genre geek, it should probably go without saying that I love horror cinema. I also love schlock, whether we’re specifically talking about cheapo, exploitative horror fare or so many other little niches of the film world that qualify on a schlocky front. But even as someone who has produced literally hundreds of horror essays for Paste over the years, often on films that can’t reasonably be labeled as anything other than trash, there’s something about the modern, low-budget horror cannibalization of the world of public domain children’s fare that I can’t help but find inherently distasteful. Not because these filmmakers have committed some unforgivable act by daring to stick a knife into the hand of a childhood icon, mind you, but because the exercise is then recycled and repeated in such trite, lazy, repetitive fashion. From the depressing precedent of Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, through a deeply confusing wave of Mickey Mouse-baiting trash horror, to the upcoming, newly unveiled Bambi: The Reckoning, what starts as a fleetingly amusing, edgy joke (for about half a second) immediately bogs down into a morass of bottom-of-the-barrel, cynical imitation. Do I blame horror geeks for being a little curious when they see one of these posters? Not really. They’re well-made posters! But who exactly is amused by this gag not just once, but dozens of times?

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The baseline aversion I feel looking at these films is notable in and of itself, given that the horror genre is not exactly opposed to repetition and the embrace of familiar tropes: Repetition is in the genre’s DNA. Most of us horror geeks still can’t resist well-constructed slasher fare, or the done-to-death familiarity of possession horror, or even the bargain bin of B-grade shark movies, which I once referred to as horror’s lowliest but most unkillable subgenre. But with any of those films, which are so often independent, low-budget features, one can at least typically put themselves in the headspace of the filmmaker in an earnest enough way to imagine how the result you’re watching could be a passion project, or an expression of that filmmaker’s genuine fondness for the material or the genre–anything other than a purely commercial enterprise. Try doing that for Blood and Honey or any of the last year’s crop of Mickey horror cinema, and it’s borderline impossible: This is pure, cynical commercialism that has been transplanted to a small scale, attempting to pass itself off as a critique of large-scale commercialism while also appealing to audience nostalgia. These movies aren’t being made by renegade filmmakers thumbing their noses at Disney’s business practices; they’re being made by guys who envy Disney resources and profit margins, who want some small piece of that pie for themselves, no matter how meager the piece might be. The guy rushing a Mickey Mouse horror movie into production in the hopes of beating half a dozen others to market? He’ll take what he can get; nor does he care much about what he’s throwing onto the screen.

That’s the problem with these films: They can’t justify their existence without the IP they’re tied to at the hip. If Blood and Honey had been produced without the ability to use the term “Winnie-the-Pooh” and described as “a killer bear man and pig man kill some people,” would anyone have bothered to make the time to watch the exact same film? Of course not. If a killer deer movie was called White-Tailed Rampage rather than Bambi: The Reckoning, who would make the time to take a second glance? No one. The quality of the films themselves are entirely incidental; only the IP ends up mattering.

This kind of public domain dumpster diving has always existed, but it was really 2023’s Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey that codified how filmmakers could hope to make a quick return on investment with this sort of millennial nostalgia-baiting horror premise. The key, as they quickly came to realize, was a particular form of “oh my, isn’t this so transgressive?!?” faux outrage, which media outlets were all too happy to provide when writer-producer-director Rhys Frake-Waterfield first unveiled his “killer Winnie-the-Pooh” creation, the 1926 Winnie-the-Pooh book from author A. A. Milne having entered the public domain in the U.S. the prior year. Film industry outlets that typically would have had nothing to do with some cheapo, $100,000 budgeted slasher movie were breathless in their headlines, helping Blood and Honey to generate awareness stretching far beyond the typical genre blogs and news aggregators. “Did you hear about that Winnie-the-Pooh horror movie?”, people would excitedly ask me throughout 2023. “I heard that it’s, you know … dark. Apparently he kills people, which is well outside his typical behavior in the cartoons I fondly remember from my ‘90s childhood. Perhaps now as a jaded 35-year-old, his knife-wielding antics will give me a brief moment of ironic joy?” The film bowled its way into theaters, and despite scathing reviews even from inveterate horror geeks, generated an absurd $7.7 million gross. All in all, it was a triumph of marketing making up for an entirely lackluster actual product, one that has now launched an entire cinematic universe.

No really, they have a logo and everything.

In terms of that product, Blood and Honey typified the low, low bar that these public domain horror movies have needed to clear in order to prove lucrative. It was shot in a mere 10 days in the English woods (which is free!), and displays most of the characteristics one would now associate with these movies as a subgenre: Shabby costumes, amateurish acting, nonexistent characterization, ugly visuals and David Yates-esque desaturated colors, a lack of all but the most misanthropic sense of humor, and constant low lighting. The latter becomes especially grating–watching Blood and Honey and its successors means trudging through countless scenes filmed in the dark, sequences that look like they’re lit by singular flood lights or the glaring headlights of a parked car, obscuring most of the frame in blobby shadows at any given time. This is obviously intended to hide the deficiencies of costuming and gory FX work, but it creates an especially lifeless presentation that hinders legibility and gets in the way of any attempt at anarchic fun. The movie is a slog, and despite subsequent attempts to bring better production values to other public domain horror films from Frake-Waterfield’s Jagged Edge Productions, they haven’t really been able to leave most of this aesthetic behind. At the very least, Frake-Waterfield has stated a desire to make these movies look more cinematic, but whether or not that can actually be achieved is another question.

And really, the likes of Blood and Honey are only the tip of this chintzy iceberg, because the resounding commercial success of that film set off a mad scramble for other would-be profiteers to crank out similar fare that could benefit from blatantly obvious “can you believe they’d do this to that character?” marketing. The most utterly saturated has been the wave of Mickey Mouse-styled horror content that immediately began percolating after the original version of the character that debuted in 1928’s Steamboat Willie, entered the public domain at the beginning of last year. By my count, there have been no fewer than at least SEVEN Mickey horror projects either released or filmed since then: The Mouse Trap and its forthcoming sequel The Mousetrap: Welcome to the Mickeyverse, Mouse of Horrors, Screamboat, I Heart Willie, Mouseboat Massacre, and … wait for it … Mickey vs. Winnie. And no, Mickey vs. Winnie doesn’t involve Frake-Waterfield’s Bloody and Honey character; this is a different filmmaker combining a horror version of Mickey with an “original” horror version of Winnie-the-Pooh, being perhaps the first time on record (but surely not the last) that one of these public domain horror movies is going out of its way to rip off a different public domain horror film, like a demented ouroboros.

These are not alternate posters for the same film. These are two different films, made by two different men who would both really, really like to profit off an animated mouse from 1928.

Frake-Waterfield and Jagged Edge Productions, meanwhile, maintain their commitment to being the preeminent public domain horror factory, a miniature Asylum wannabe specializing in a single concept pushed well past its expiration date and far beyond any logical stopping point, establishing what they’re now referring to as The Twisted Childhood Universe as a shared film universe to contain Blood and Honey and its follow-ups. Those follow-ups now include Blood and Honey 2, this year’s Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare, and the upcoming Bambi: Reckoning, Pinnochio: Unstrung and the queen mother of all public domain horror concepts: Poohniverse: Monsters Assemble, an Avengers-style crossover team-up movie that will include “returning characters such as Winnie-the-Pooh, Tigger, Piglet, Owl, Bambi, Peter Pan, Tinker Bell, Hook, Pinocchio and the Cricket, while also introducing Rabbit, Sleeping Beauty, the Mad Hatter, Cheshire Cat, Mary Poppins and others to the cast.” If there was any lingering doubt that these guys envy MCU-style profitability more than they resent it, let this gaudy team up make the motives behind these films crystal clear.

How does one summon up the enthusiasm to continue interacting with premise after premise that boils down to “What if RECOGNIZABLE CHILDHOOD IP, except evil?” How can you see poster after well-designed poster for derivative slashers starring these characters and not eventually come to resent the forever uninspired reality of the results? If “underpromise and overdeliver” is a maxim that typically results in satisfaction, then surely this subgenre is the cinematic equivalent of the opposite: They promise some kind of irreverent, almost profane form of amusement, but then fail to even interact with their themes in any inspired way. What kills from Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey truly reflected any kind of creative use of the IP that is the entire reason for the film’s existence? When he stabs a guy? Or … when he stabs another guy, and runs him over with a car? Lord knows, we couldn’t have done that without the groundbreaking work of children’s author A. A. Milne.

Say what you will of a film series like Damien Leone’s Terrifier, but those movies manage to be deeply gross, gory, bizarre and (relatively) inexpensive without ever needing the crutch of “we blasphemed a character from your pajamas, how droll!” Where Leone is unafraid to work in the bright light of day, proud of his sick, individualistic sense of humor and seemingly uncaring if anyone else finds any value in his creation, Blood and Honey and its followers continue to pander to that seemingly inexhaustible millennial craving for anything that has been recontextualized from their own childhoods. There’s no joke I could make that they wouldn’t see fit to also turn into a hollow slasher film. Teddy Ruxpin horror? Someone apparently put that in a horror film in 2019, but I’m sure someone else is working on a feature length version. If these films have demonstrated one thing for us, it’s that there’s nothing so trite that it can’t be expounded into 84 minutes of poorly lit stumbling. But that doesn’t mean horror fans should keep enabling this form of zero-inspiration filmmaking forever. Bambi doesn’t need to be a horror villain. Let the poor little deer rest in the annals of film history, rather than dragging him through the mud and the blood.

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter or on Bluesky for more film writing.

Maybe Not Every Public Domain Character Needs Their Own Horror Film?