Warning: Contains spoilers for Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood & HoneyBy turning beloved children's characters into murderous monsters, Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood & Honey already sets itself apart from other horror movies, and its lone survivor breaks a crucial slasher trope. Written and directed by Rhys Frake-Waterfield, Blood and Honey focuses on Pooh and Piglet getting revenge on Christopher Robin (Nikolai Leon) after he abandons his childhood friends to pursue the charms of adulthood, but also includes Maria (Maria Taylor), Jess (Natasha Rose Mills), and their group of friends unwittingly vacationing in the Hundred Acre Wood. When their storylines collide, the resulting bloodbath includes a multitude of victims at the hands of Pooh and Piglet.
Driven to hate humans after Christopher's absence forced Pooh and the rest of his friends to eat Eeyore, they stalk their prey through the Hundred Acre Wood, killing them off one by one. By the end of Bloody & Honey, only Christopher and Maria have managed to stay alive, and it's anyone's guess who will make it out of the woods. The final confrontation with Pooh determines which one of them will survive, with the typical tropes of the slasher genre levied against the needs of the established narrative.
Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood & Honey Doesn't Have A Final Girl
One of the most common tropes in slasher movies is the final girl, someone like Jamie Lee Curtis's Laurie Strode in Halloween who makes it to the end of the movie without dying at the hands of the maniacal killer, but Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood & Honey doesn't have one. Even when Maria and Jess come across some local men and the film makes it seem like they might finally make it out of the Hundred Acre Wood, they get pulled back into Pooh's killing spree, and not even Christopher Robin can save them. When he attempts to kill Pooh by running him over and saving Maria, Pooh is able to survive and slice her throat, leaving only Christopher left alive.
A final girl often represents the triumph of good over evil and of the covetous victim finally standing up for themselves. She acts as a direct response to women's roles in horror movies before the slasher genre emerged when female victims simply acted the part of "scream queens" to intensify the surrounding terror. By not surviving, Maria disrupts a typical slasher trope, but Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood & Honey does present her as a competent survivor up to that point, who has not let her past trauma define her.
Why Christopher Robin Survives Blood & Honey's Ending (Not Maria)
In another type of slasher movie, Maria might have survived, but there's a reason why Christopher Robin makes it to the end of Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood & Honey and not Maria. When Pooh is holding the knife to Maria's throat and Christopher is pleading for him not to kill her, even vowing to remain in the Hundred Acre Wood forever if he'll let her go, Pooh breaks his vow of silence. Pooh stares at Christopher Robin and says, "You left," and slices her throat, a final twist of the knife in Christopher's heart for his former friend's betrayal.
Christopher flees the Hundred Acre Wood but must live with the guilt of his survival. Had he not abandoned his friends and left them to fend for themselves all those years before, they might not have resorted to becoming feral human-hating monsters. Maria, already a trauma survivor, became an innocent victim caught up in the ramifications of Christopher's selfishness. Perhaps the planned sequel to Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood & Honey can explore Christopher's healing process while it examines his remorse for the lives he's ruined, including Pooh's.