The Teletubbies Being Turned Into Something Even More Horrifying?
Rhys Frake-Waterfield, who directed the slasher Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, wants to make similar adaptations of the Teletubbies and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
When the first trailer dropped for Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey (a horror movie starring everyone’s favorite forgetful bear), everyone had the same question: how the heck was anyone allowed to make this? The short answer is that the copyright finally fell off the original A.A. Milne collection of stories featuring this iconic character, and that allowed director Rhys Frake-Waterfield to bring this very unconventional and unexpected horror movie to life. In a recent interview with Collider, this Winnie the Pooh director said that he’d like to do horror adaptations of both Teletubbies and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles if he could.
Why, though, would anyone want to turn the hypnotic goofiness of Teletubbies into something scary? The short answer is that horror movies often rely on frightening you with the unexpected (hence, all those jump scares). Just as he did with Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, the director is hoping that the juxtaposition of familiar childlike elements with something spooky and grown-up would be even more shocking to audiences that have perhaps grown numb to the usual abundance of blood and gore in horror flicks.
Weirdly enough, the Winnie the Pooh director isn’t the first one to come up with the idea of turning Teletubbies into something horrific. Back in 2012, a team of fans known as ZeoWorks created a popular game called Slendytubbies that, as the name implies, blended the aesthetics of both the kid-friendly Teletubbies and the creepy Slenderman into a kind of survival horror nightmare. Whether you love or hate the Teletubbies, that game was genuinely creepy to play and spawned a number of sequels and spinoffs, so it seems like there really is a market for scary Teletubbies content out there.
And while it’s notably weird that the director of Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey wants to take a crack at adapting the Teletubbies, he seemed even more enthusiastic about the possibility of creating a horror adaptation of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Director Rhys Frake-Waterfield specifically brought up how he’d like to create a movie showing the turtles viciously dicing up their opponents and then feeding what remains to Master Splinter. There may be merit to this idea as well: before the kid-friendly cartoon came along, the Ninja Turtles of the Mirage Comics viciously killed Shredder in their first confrontation, and later guest writers like Rick Veitch would add explicit horror elements to the series (in particular, the comics featuring a leech who sucks out some of Raphael’s mutagenic blood and turns into a giant monster is sure to keep you up at night).
Unfortunately, it’s almost impossible we’ll ever see the director of Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey take a crack at either Teletubbies or Ninja Turtles. After all, he had to wait almost a century for the Winnie the Pooh copyright to expire, and Ninja Turtles and Teletubbies are much newer creations (created, respectively, in 1984 and 1998). Still, you can always experience the next best thing: once you have a kid, niece, or nephew force you to watch enough episodes of Teletubbies, you’ll learn that the show never needed buckets of blood to be pretty damn terrifying all on its own.
