This week on Friday Night Frightfest, we are venturing into the wild, lawless frontier of public domain horror! When copyright protection expires on beloved childhood literature, indie filmmakers get to do the unthinkable: turn gentle storybook icons into bloodthirsty monsters. Today, we are analyzing two flagship entries from Jagged Edge Productions’ infamous “Twisted Childhood Universe”—pairing the micro-budget viral sensation Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey (2023) with the high-octane creature-feature Bambi: The Reckoning (2025). Grab your honey pots and keep your head on a swivel—nostalgia has never been this lethal.

Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey (2023)

Written and directed by Rhys Frake-Waterfield, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey capitalized on the 1926 A.A. Milne book entering the public domain to deliver a viral slasher spectacle. When a grown-up Christopher Robin leaves for college, his abandoned woodland companions—Pooh and Piglet—feel betrayed and starve during the winter. Reverting to feral, animalistic instincts, they swear off human speech, murder Eeyore for food, and vow vengeance against humanity. Years later, when Christopher returns to the Hundred Acre Wood with his fiancée alongside a group of university students renting a nearby cabin, Pooh and Piglet embark on a brutal, sledgehammer-and-machete rampage. Raw, absurd, and unapologetically schlocky, it sparked a global conversation about the future of iconic IP.

Bambi: The Reckoning (2025)

Directed by Dan Allen and produced by the Jagged Edge team, Bambi: The Reckoning takes Felix Salten’s classic 1923 coming-of-age story and mutates it into a vicious, revenge-driven creature feature. Following a tragic car accident in a remote forest, a mother (Roxanne McKee) and her young son find themselves trapped in the woods. But they aren’t alone: the forest is stalked by a massive, mutated deer driven mad by grief and toxic contamination after a hunter killed its mother years prior. Trading traditional slasher masks for an unstoppable, rabid beast flipping cars and tearing through the trees, the film leans heavily into practical creature effects, dark action beats, and creature-feature mayhem.

Join us as we dissect this wave of fairy-tale slasher cinema! We’ll discuss how viral internet hype translates into feature-length horror, comparing the scrappy, low-budget cabin carnage of Pooh to the creature-feature scale of Bambi.

Spoilers start around 6:55.