A young woman in a skimpy bathing suit floats in a hot tub. Just seconds ago, she caught sight of an unfamiliar creature, a hulking figure in the background of the selfies she took. But like so many horror movie victims, she ignored good sense and laid back in the tub, unaware of the danger looming behind her.
This setup may be familiar, but the assailants are neither Freddy nor Jason nor Chucky. They are Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet, lovable denizens of the Hundred Acre Wood.
How can this happen, you might wonder? While neither writer A. A. Milne nor illustrator Ernest H. Shepard, who introduced Pooh and friends in the 1926 book Winnie-the-Pooh, are no longer alive to raise objections, most people know Pooh and Piglet as Disney characters. Since 1961, The Walt Disney Company has owned the rights to Milne and Shepard’s characters and have fought anyone who would impinge on their property.
But on January 1, 2022, Winnie-the-Pooh entered the public domain, as did the characters it contained, which gave writer/director Rhys Frake-Waterfield the legal permission to make his low-budget slasher Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey. And nobody, not even Disney, can stop him.
Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey establishes its new take on familiar characters in its opening scene. Accompanied by a narrator (Toby Wynn-Davies) who toes the line between comforting and terrifying, rough animation retells the first meeting of young Christopher Robin and the creatures in the Hundred Acre Wood, namely Pooh, Piglet, Owl, Rabbit, and Eeyore. Instead of stuffed animals come to life, these are human/animal hybrids, “abominations” in the words of the narrator. Christopher Robin and the creatures enjoy years together, but when the boy becomes a young man and leaves for college, Pooh and his friends begin to starve and turn feral.
After desperation drives them to eat Eeyore, Pooh, and Piglet develop a hatred of humanity, just in time for an adult Christopher Robin (Nikolai Leon) to return to the Hundred Acre Wood, at the same time that a sextet of young women, led by the traumatized Maria (Maria Taylor), rent a nearby cabin for some downtime.
But even if you want Pooh to be a tubby little cubby all stuffed with fluff, it’s hard not to cheer for Blood and Honey on principle (or lack of principle) alone.
As stuffed as that description certainly is, Blood and Honey has little interest in plot. Instead, all of the movie’s relatively minuscule budget (less than $100,000) goes toward effects, which are indeed gnarly. Christopher Robin spends most of the movie chained inside Pooh’s cabin, where the willy-nilly old bear whips him with Eeyore’s tail. The aforementioned hot tub woman gets dragged by Piglet in front of a car driven by Pooh, who proceeds to drive slowly over her head. In each case, the camera lingers on the blood spilled, the welts bubbling on Christopher Robin’s back, and the young woman’s eyeball popping out.
If that description turns your stomach, then the filmmaker has succeeded. The movie exists only to bask in the transgressive glee of turning lovable children’s book characters into horrible monsters. But even if you want Pooh to be a tubby little cubby all stuffed with fluff, it’s hard not to cheer for Blood and Honey on principle (or lack of principle) alone. The movie owes its existence to two specific statutes—parody law and public domain.
The latter has a particularly checkered history. Realizing that their copyright on Mickey Mouse would end when 1928’s Steamboat Willie entered the public domain on January 1, 2004, Disney put pressure on Congress to pass extensions on copyright. Previously, copyright expired at the earliest of the following three points: fifty years after the author’s death, seventy-five years after publication, or 100 years after creation. Passed in 1998, the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (also known as the Mickey Mouse Act, and named for musician Sonny Bono who at the time was serving in the U.S. Congress as a Republican Representative from California) changed the terms of entry into public domain to seventy years after the author’s death, 120 years after creation, or ninety-five years after publication. Under the new law, anything created before January 1, 1978 had a total of ninety-five years in copyright.
Not only did Mickey Mouse stay in Disney’s control, but basically nothing went into the public domain for another twenty years. Despite the efforts of Disney (along with Warner Brothers, Sony, and other conglomerates) to continue extending copyright, January 1, 2019 saw the first new additions to the public domain in several decades, these included Cecil B. DeMille’s movie The Ten Commandments and Agatha Christie’s second Hercule Poirot novel Murder on the Links. And unless Disney and their collaborators are able to further change the law, Mickey Mouse will (sort of) join the public domain in 2024.
This development should excite progressives. Sure, Blood and Honey plays on viewer’s basest instincts, not even pretending to give them anything new or creative, by simply plugging unlikely characters into a well-worn franchise. But its very existence is a victory against corporate domination.
Frake-Waterfield got to do something with Pooh that had nothing to do with Disney. As a lover of horror movies, he got to offer his take on Pooh, twisted as it certainly is. And even better, we all get to do the same now that the character is in the public domain.
Disney, Warner Brothers, and others want to colonize the human imagination for the sake of their profits. They want us to see ourselves in the playful Christopher Robin, to get our morals from Superman, to wrap our children in blankets emblazoned with Mickey Mouse. They want us to associate happiness with Disneyland and anarchy with the pranks that Bugs Bunny launches at kings and business leaders. They want us to pay for the right to have feelings and dreams.
For some, these tendencies prove Theodor Adorno’s proclamation that “The whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture industry.” But in emphasizing the power of corporations, Adorno and other Frankfurt School adherents disregarded the power of people’s imagination. As humans, we tell one another stories and imagine scenarios. The plots and characters that seep into our minds become part of those stories. Indeed, they have meaning only to the extent that we give them meaning, only to the extent that we make them matter.
In short, Mickey Mouse, Winnie-the-Pooh, Superman, and others do not belong to Disney or Warner Brothers. The people who created those stories have long since died (and, in many cases, the key creators were cheated by others who claimed sole credit, as in the case of Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks). The characters only matter now because we decide to keep them in our imagination and we continue to tell and retell their stories.
Disney and its fellow corporations have fought to keep their mental colonies intact and limit our imaginations, reducing us to consumers who have to purchase the tools of our identity formation. But public domain returns these characters and these stories back to the people, back where they belong.
Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey may not conform to your idea of a good Winnie-the-Pooh story. But thanks to the bear’s inclusion in the public domain, you’re free to tell your own version of a good Pooh story, to pour your imagination and ideas into a character that means so much to you, regardless of what Disney wants.