As more and more beloved characters enter the public domain, audiences are increasingly seeing their childhood favorites step into newer, and often bloodier, roles. Nowhere is this concept more visible than in ITN Studios’ brand-new trailer for Piglet, an upcoming horror film that casts the Winnie the Pooh character as a murderous slasher with mysterious motives and origins.

The Piglet trailer, which can be found below, follows a group of girls who rent a cabin in the middle of a forest to celebrate their friend Kate’s 21st birthday. While her companions may be excited to party it up in the woods, Kate seems to have some misgivings about this trip — as well as a past with the cabin that no one else seems to know about. The girls’ birthday plans get complicated when the cabin’s owner sells them out to a masked murderer known only as “Piglet,” leaving them to a fate of gory destruction. As the kills ramp up, Kate is challenged with confronting her past while escaping this cartoon-inspired nightmare.

While Piglet may sound similar to the infamous Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey — which also centered a Piglet-inspired character embarking on a murderous rampage — these two films are not made by the same studios, and share no relation. Blood and Honey’s sensational success spurred its directors to announce two more sequels, one of which premiered last March. ITN Studios no doubt remains optimistic that audiences’ fascination with cartoon-inspired slashers will persist in time for Piglet’s release date, which has yet to be announced.

What Other Characters Are Receiving the ‘Piglet’ Treatment?

Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey may be the most famous example of a lovable childhood- character-turned-slasher in recent years. But Winnie-the-Pooh is not the only public domain property to intrigue horror filmmakers. Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare, for example, is slated for a Halloween release this year and will follow an adult Wendy Darling attempting to rescue her brother Michael from a twisted version of Peter Pan. A monstrous rendition of Mickey Mouse’s Steamboat Willie will later sail into theaters with the January 2025 thriller Screamboat. And that’s all to say nothing of Bambi: The Reckoning, which will show audiences what happens when a mutated deer blames a mother and son for the recent death of his mother.

Love them or hate them, these characters all lie in the public domain, and these bloody cinematic takes on them are probably here to stay. Will the upcoming Piglet birth a smash-hit franchise in the same way as Blood and Honey? Fans will have to wait and see — and discover what dark secrets the titular character of Piglet has in store.

via Collider