Member-only story
Winnie the Pooh and Bambi fell out of copyright and were immediately made into upsetting horror films. Why this fad, why now?
It is nothing new for well known characters to enter the public domain where anyone can use them in a movie. It has become a familiar feature of the pop culture lifecycle. But when the characters from Peter Pan or The Wizard of Oz became free around the year 2000–2002 there was no rush of demonic retellings wherein Peter crept up on families in the night, cutting parents’ throats and kidnapping children to put them in a pit in Neverland. Nor was there a vision of The Cowardly Lion, Tin Man, and Scarecrow rampaging across Kansas until chased down by the Wizard and cast back to Oz. The nostalgic impulse that makes something like Winnie the Pooh Blood and Honey a viral lightning rod, the sense that something from a sacred time of life is being violated, would have been just as relevant for Pan and Oz. So why has this never happened before?
Why are these movies getting made? Why are they getting so much attention, and why is it the horror genre specifically that has picked up these properties*?
One possible explanation is the inducements and reasoning cultivated by social media clickbait culture. Most of online engagement is driven by negative reaction, as accounted in Max Fisher’s recent book on the culture of Social Media, The…