Rhys Frake-Waterfield produces horror whose premise needs little explaining: familiar children's characters become killers. We can see why that attracts attention, but his murderous Pooh is too dull to recommend.
Fi1m perspective
The animal masks in Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey (2023) briefly disturb, before the sluggish attacks give us time to lose interest. Frake-Waterfield writes, directs and produces a straight-faced slasher that mostly relies on familiar faces to make its killers worth watching. There is a workable horror idea here: a childhood companion abandoned and made monstrous. We would happily watch that film, but this one spends too little time making us care about the people in danger.
His route into directing ran through visual effects and producing on direct-to-video titles, then films including The Area 51 Incident (2022). With Jagged Edge Productions and regular production partner Scott Jeffrey, he has built a continuing supply of horror films around recognisable concepts. Public-domain children's characters give that approach a particular advantage: the audience understands the attraction before a scene has played. Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey became his first theatrical release after attracting viral attention.
The editing by Frake-Waterfield and Scott Chambers leaves attacks repeating without enough changes of pace or expectation. Andrew Scott Bell's music has to work against stretches in which there is almost nothing to anticipate. We were bored, then irritated, because the film spent far longer hurting its women than giving us reasons to care about them. A few effective moments of gore are not enough to make the repetition bearable.
Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 (2024) and his producing work on Peter Pan's Neverland Nightmare (2025) show the idea becoming a continuing series. The first Pooh film gives us little confidence that another familiar name alone will make an evening of it. Before adding another childhood favourite, we would rather he made us worry about one person in danger.
Biography
Rhys Frake-Waterfield is a British filmmaker who works as a director, writer, producer and editor. He is best known for Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey (2023), on which he served as director, writer, editor and producer. The low-budget independent horror film was the first theatrical release for both Frake-Waterfield and his company Jagged Edge Productions, which he co-founded with Scott Jeffrey.
Frake-Waterfield is from Essex and graduated from the University of Essex with a first-class degree in economics. He left a corporate role at EDF Energy in 2021 to enter the film industry. He has since produced and directed numerous low-budget horror features, many drawing on public-domain properties, and launched the Twisted Childhood Universe with the Winnie-the-Pooh film and its 2024 sequel.
