The release of Pooh: Blood & Honey a few years back gave birth to a rising trend in the B-movie horror genre. If you’ve ever wanted to see classic public domain characters like Bambi get reimagined as slasher villains with grim backstories and gruesome kills to dispense, the Twisted Childhood Universe has got you covered. And wouldn’t you know it, the space is growingn with two new entries in 2025, both of which got trailers just ahead of the weekend.
Our first is Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare, which got a first look back at Comic-Con this past summer. The film sees a grown-up Wendy Darling (Megan Placito) embark on a quest to save her little brother Michael from an evil version of Peter Pan played by Martin Portlock. According to director Scott Jeffrey, this is “exremely darker” to the Blood & Honey films, tone-wise, and that definitely appears to be the case. This version of Peter is….kind of all over the place; at the start of the trailer, he’s acting like Pennywise from It, then for the rest of it, he’s kind of a mix between Michael Myers, the Joker, and also kind of the Grabber from Black Phone? It’s an odd thing, even moreso when it’s teased that he can fly and we see him viciously murder a bunch of people before the title card hits.
Next up is Screamboat, which isn’t connected in any way to the TCU (and not the slasher Steamboat movie from earlier this year), but you wouldn’t know that from the setup. This one is said to be more of a horror-comedy and centers on a “mischievious mouse” stalking some New Yorkers on a late night ferry ride. Gruesome as it looks, director Steven LaMorte told IndieWire the movie served two purposes: one, it could be a “love letter” to Steamboat Willie, which entered the public domain earlier this year. And two, it let him make a horror film on the Staten Island Ferry, a project he’s spent years longing to do. “I could either make a random movie about the ferry or I could do Steamboat Willie,” he said. “Which one do you think people are going to want to go see?”
For the practical horror fans, LaMorte also talked up the murder mouse as a “100 percent, in-camera practical creature” designed as a puppet and costume by Quantum Creation FX, a studio that’s worked on The Predator, The Mandalorian, and several Marvel movies. Because of the creature’s size, the creature pulls off some “pretty tough” but “really crazy” kills throughout the film. The kills are apparently so gnarly that LaMorte felt he’ll “have to have an awkward conversation with my mother about after we’re done.”
Screamboat will sail to theaters sometime in 2025, while Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare has a slightly more concrete window of early in the year.
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