The director of 'Winnie -the-Pooh: Blood and Honey' has received ...

The director of the controversial Winnie-the-Pooh horror film, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood And Honey, has revealed that he has received death threats because of his gruesome adaptation of the classic A.A. Milne children’s stories. 

The film’s director, Rhys Frake-Waterfield, spoke to Variety in May 2022 and explained that Blood and Honey sees Winnie and Piglet become killers after Christopher Robin goes to college. He said: “Christopher Robin is pulled away from them, and he’s not [given] them food, it’s made Pooh and Piglet’s life quite difficult… Because they’ve had to fend for themselves so much, they’ve essentially become feral. So they’ve gone back to their animal roots. They’re no longer tame: they’re like a vicious bear and pig who want to go around and try and find prey.”

Notably, the filmmaker was one of the first to use the expiration of the copyright for A.A. Milne’s books, which Disney held until recently. Per US law, copyrights expire 95 years after a work is first published – Winnie-the-Pooh debuted in 1926.

Now, Frake-Waterfield has revealed that some people have been so outraged over his adaption that some have even sent him death threats. “Look, this is mental,” he told the AFP. “I’ve had petitions to stop it. I’ve had death threats. I’ve had people saying they called the police.”

Blood and Honey has already been released in cinemas in Mexico, making nearly $1million in two weeks. This has led Frake-Waterfield to believe that his movie might achieve the highest “budget-to-box office ratio” since 2007’s Paranormal Activity, a title made for $15,000 that launched a franchise worth nearly $1billion.

“I really believed in the idea. Other people didn’t… and now it’s doing all right,” the director quipped.

Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey is set for a UK release on March 10th.