Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey director is being targeted with death threats

Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey is off to a storming start with the strange slasher scoring incredible reviews from fans, praising its premise and absurd interpretation of Christopher Robin's anthropomorphic companions.

"It was really surreal," explained director Rhys Frake-Waterfield in an interview about the response to the twisted take on a cherished childhood story. In the movie, Christopher Robin, now an adult, returns to the Hundred Acre Wood to prove to his wife that these friends of his weren't imaginary. However, in the years that have passed, Winnie the Pooh and Piglet resent the boy for abandoning them and wreak their revenge.

"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," continued the director. "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."

Check out the trailer below:

Odd, but nothing to get too up in arms about. That's what a rational person would have thought, but it turns out that Frake-Waterfield is suffering from a barrage of death threats over the grisly bear movie. "Look, this is mental, I've had petitions to stop it. I've had death threats," revealed the director in an interview with AFP. "I've had people saying they called the police."

Over what, precisely? And the thing is, Frake-Waterfield is well within his rights to turn A. A. Milne and E. H. Shepard's work into a sticky and splashy horror. It became part of the public domain in 2022, and he and his team were free to do whatever they wanted as long as it didn't encroach on Disney's iterations of the characters. They've obviously achieved that.

If you're curious, then Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey comes to the United Kingdom on 10 March.