After hitting the headlines for capitalizing on the classic A. A. Milne creation entering the public domain with a distinctly different twist, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey proved a financial success at the box office. Helped by a viral trailer and some more money being pumped into the project by distributors Altitude Film Distribution, the $100,000 budget yielded over $5.2 million at cinemas worldwide – a superb return on investment.
Now, the creators behind Blood and Honey are eyeing up Peter Pan and even Bambi as the next additions to their horror adaptations, per Empire Online. While the targeting of characters that have most popularly been brought to the screen by Disney is a somewhat novel approach, changing distinctly un-scary things, beings, and characters into much more murderous ones isn’t.
Several now-iconic movie villains originated in this way, so perhaps the upcoming flicks from Rhys Frake-Waterfield will create the next ones.
Eyeless and stagnating before a feast
In 2006, one of the most iconic non-English horror movies was released by Guillermo del Toro to put a horror twist on tales for children, in a much better way than Blood and Honey. Aiming to and successfully turning fairy tales into a grand setting for horror, Pan’s Labyrinth is now hailed among the best fantasy horror films ever made. Key to this was the seemingly innocuous Pale Man.
Upon entering the room, the protagonist Ofelia sees a very pale, eyeless humanoid with a bounty of food at its table that she shouldn’t eat. The Pale Man is motionless, perhaps now just a part of the furniture, but once she begins to tuck into the bounty, it awakes. It places its eyes in its hands and very slowly starts to walk toward Ofelia. Out of context, the Pale Man is almost comedic looking and wasn’t scary while merely sitting dormant. The camera work did a lot to build this up as a particularly potent scene, at which point the excellent design kicks in.
Covetous little creature gets its revenge
Too many, leprechauns have rather happy and cheery connotations. A creature of Irish folklore, they’re a kind of fairy that love their pot of gold and use little tricks to keep it safe. So close is this association with the creature and its gold that one of the most popular online slot games ever made is Rainbow Riches, which centers on a leprechaun taking players down the Road to Riches. The leprechaun follows the myth in this game as you need to find it on the reels before you get a chance to follow it, potentially towards its jackpot.
The exact opposite of all of this, other than its true-to-lore depiction of the creature as being of “little body,” is the infamous horror movie series Leprechaun. Starring Warwick Davis for the most part, the films feature a creature that turns murderous in its pursuit of getting all of its gold back from a haphazardly thieving human. The mythical creatures are as tricky as the Leprechaun movies, but usually just disappear after the human keeping them captive turns their eye away.
It certainly didn’t receive stellar reviews, but Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey’s box office haul will only spur more of these horror flicks that pivot a cutesy character into a menacing villain.