The new film WINNIE THE POOH: BLOOD AND HONEY is a dark and bloody good time, and fully aware of what it is. Though named after the iconic fictional bear created by English author A.A. Milne in the 1920s, the similarities end there. This is not the beloved Pooh nestled deeply in so many nostalgic childhood memories, and one most certainly doesn’t want to go venturing into this new version of 100 Acre Wood. Here, Pooh is pissed and more likely to give nightmares than an undying, innocent friendship.
The brainchild of director and writer Rhys Frake-Waterfield, WINNIE THE POOH: BLOOD AND HONEY has been rustling feathers and inciting laughter since first being announced in the summer of 2022. While the destruction of a cherished childhood character had some clutching their pearls, the sheer nerve had others cheering the filmmakers on from the jump.
One such cheerleader was composer Andrew Scott Bell. No stranger to horror, Bell’s credits include PSYCHO STORM CHASER, DEATHCEMBER, the 2022 Fangoria Chainsaw Awards and an impressive array of killer shorts like THE VICIOUS, NITE FLIRT, and LOWER WORLD. With an infectious energy and boundless imagination, Bell’s ability to think outside the box has produced a catalog rich with engaging, exceptional music. That said, Bell truly outdid himself with his score for WINNIE THE POOH: BLOOD AND HONEY.
Dextrously navigating playful motifs, unsettling strings, ominous choirs, and sentimental piano melodies, Bell achieves an artful balance between two very different Pooh bears. By no means an easy task, Bell’s thoughtful approach adds a level of polish and weight to Frake-Waterfield’s playfully twisted creation.
To learn a bit more about Bell’s adventure with Pooh, we sat down with the brave composer for a chat. Always a fantastic interview subject, Bell opened up about his approach to the material, working with the BLOOD AND HONEY team, the power of limitations and oh, yes. We talk all about the famous Beehiveolin.
DG: Congrats on the film finally being released out into the wild! The hype and discussion about it have been non-stop ever since it was announced.
Andrew Scott Bell: It’s been kind of crazy. It’s been a little overwhelming. I worked on a Lifetime [movie], PSYCHO STORM CHASER, and it was fun on Twitter to see everyone talking about that when it first aired. You know, we spoke about that movie. And I had an NBC show with Ava DuVernay, HOME SWEET HOME, which would get some mentions every week that were fun to look at and engage with. I like talking to people who enjoy my stuff, but with this one, it’s so massively overwhelming. Every time I look at Twitter, it’s like, hundreds of new tweets. I’ve never had it on this scale before.
How and when did you first get involved with the project?
I started to hear chatter around the L.A. horror community about a Winnie the Pooh horror movie, and it just sounded so fun to me. I think my reaction was similar to a lot of people which was, “That’s crazy! I love that!”
Right around that time, the images of the movie and what Winnie the Pooh looked like were released online and started to go viral. At that point, I was like, “Let me look this up.” So I looked up Rhys Frake-Waterfield on IMDB and found his Instagram. The fire was just catching, and people were finding him the same way I found him and replying or commenting on his posts saying, “You’re ruining my childhood!” and all this stuff.
And he was (I love Rhys for this because he’s so engaged in this way and not shy about it) screenshotting comments and posting them onto his story saying, “I want to ruin everyone’s childhood,” or something like that. And I just, on a whim, replied to his story and wrote, “Can I help you?” with a little violin emoji.
I think he thought that was really fun because we just started talking from there about his ideas and my ideas for the music. He was then and still is so busy, so I didn’t hear from him for a while. I was getting ready to go on a vacation with my family for my dad’s retirement, literally holding my suitcase in one hand, heading out the door to go to the airport, and I heard a little ding in my pocket. It was a WhatsApp group chat that said, “Winnie the Pooh Post-Production.” So I was like, “Oh! I think I’m doing this movie!” [Laughs]
It’s been a blast since then. I love Rhys and Scott [Jeffrey]. They’re incredible to work with, and they’re very creative and playful in how they work. That then trickles down to the whole cast and crew. It’s such a wonky, crazy, fun movie, and just by the nature of who they are, they encouraged us all to be playful, have fun and do our best.
Once you were officially on the project, how involved was the creative team in determining the direction of the music?
Initially, I couldn’t see the movie, and they hadn’t given me a script or anything like that, so they gave me the premise of the movie. I remember talking about the fact that most of it it takes place in the woods and that there’s a cabin in the woods. We started to spitball ideas like, “What if we used a lot of strings? What if we used a lot of orchestral elements? But, in a way that doesn’t feel fully Hollywood orchestral, but almost more folk horror?”
The movie THE RITUAL is kind of folk horror to me, so that was a thought. I didn’t watch it again because I try not to listen too closely to references that I have for myself. It was more like, “What do I remember that soundtrack or movie feeling like?” So, we talked about that.
We also talked about the idea that Winnie the Pooh is still kind of a whimsical character. Even the first two minutes of the movie is the backstory of when Christopher Robin was young. It has this beautiful animation that is like hand-drawn sketches. It’s a prologue of when Christopher Robin found these animals in the woods and became their friends. That’s the first bit of music that I wrote for the movie, and I was trying to tap into that whimsy, that childlike wonder and innocence so that we could strip it away through the rest of the movie.
Those were kind of the initial conversations. But one more thing I mentioned to Rhys was the idea of having a choir saying “Blood and Honey” in Latin. Like, how hysterical that would be. Because when you hear a choir singing in Latin, it feels so serious.
Oh, totally. Like in THE OMEN, right?
Like THE OMEN! Even in an action-figure-based, toy-selling movie like STAR WARS: THE PHANTOM MENACE, there’s the “Duel of the Fates,” and it’s, like, so serious. So I was like, “What if we have a Latin choir singing ‘Blood and Honey’? Maybe some people will look it up and get it, but for the most part, it’s just silly.” And he just loved that idea.
That’s kind of what I was saying earlier how they’re just playful, and they just wanted to have fun with making this movie. That was such a joy to be around. It was never like, “Oh, I don’t know about that.” It was always, “You have an idea? Let’s hear it.”
Winnie the Pooh’s world is so iconic, and while everyone was clearly having fun and toying with that original source material, did it inspire any of your instrumentation choices or impact the music in ways people might not even realize?
Sure. That’s a really great question. One thing that we all purposely did was stay as far away from any Disney adaptation as possible. This is, I think, the first non-Disney screen adaptation of Winnie the Pooh, which is fantastic. So, I really only tried to think about the original book.
I just wanted this to be its own thing completely.
I reread the book, which has many little short stories, and they’re each kind of like chapters. And I just remember feeling like, “If I was to orchestrate this, if I was to write this music and it wasn’t a horror movie, it would feel almost like ‘Peter and the Wolf’ to me.” Do you remember “Peter and the Wolf?”
Sure, by Prokofiev?
Yeah. There’s the different instruments for the different characters and stuff. So without listening to that and being influenced, I tried to remember the vague idea of what that is. I don’t normally start with the opening of the movie as the first piece of music that I work on, but for this one I did. I really wanted to nail that whimsical feeling. I keep saying whimsical, but that’s really the best way to describe that jovial, childlike wonder that is Winnie the Pooh.
I wanted to nail that in its purest form so that then I could reference it later throughout different scenes. What I intentionally tried to write was like flutes and oboe and glissandos on the harp. And there’s glockenspiel-like high bells that brings a youthful energy to it that you can reference later. Some of these themes, you can play it in the flutes or in the woodwinds in the beginning where it’s all whimsy, but then later, when it’s in low brass or the low male choir, it feels kind of dark. It’s fun.
The last thing about this opening piece, I think it’s a fan theory, but it’s a fun fan theory, is that a lot of people think John Williams writes his musical themes by humming the name of the movie or singing about the movie. It’s never been confirmed, but I think it’s fun, and I’ve never really tried it until now.
A really great example is the SUPERMAN theme. The fanfare moment is [sings a section of the main SUPERMAN theme]. It sounds just the way somebody would say “Super-Man! Super-Man!” So I had a little fun with that in the Winnie the Pooh motif. I don’t think anyone would notice it, but it’s fun for me, you know?
Hey, I mean, wherever inspiration comes from, it makes sense to follow that.
So then from there, [we] hear the darker version of that theme a little bit later. It’s the same theme from the beginning; it’s just slower. It’s [also] played lower on the piano; the cello takes the main melody, and the lower-voiced choir is darker. So even though it’s the same whimsical theme, it just feels darker. And that comes back throughout the movie, depending on the scene and when we chose to do that.
Were you able to hire singers for those choir parts?
I actually did all of the vocals.
Ok, so that’s pretty impressive.
Except for the higher-voice stuff. Those were from a library that I have on the computer, but when you double them and layer them with my male voices underneath, it all feels very real. I really wanted the Latin version of “Blood and Honey,” and you can’t really do that on the computer. And we didn’t really have the budget to hire a whole 50-piece choir, so it’s me layered like 25 to 30 times.
I just do it in a couple of different voices so that it’s not all the same voice. You’re pretending to be a bunch of different people. And then, I don’t pitch correct it. I don’t tune it so that it really does feel like a lot of people. Because I think if I had tuned it, it all feels like one.
It’s funny how leaving those little imperfections in, that’s what makes it feel human.
Exactly, exactly. So against my better nature, I didn’t tune myself when I sang this and I sang it kind of wild sometimes. Like, I intentionally like sang a big huge opera voice or something, you know? And did that like 25 or 30 times.
I’m glad you mentioned the budget because that’s something I wanted to ask you about. There’s been a lot of attention given to this, SKINAMARINK, TERRIFIER 2, and THE OUTWATERS, with special attention paid to their lower budgets and large grosses. However, budgets can have huge impacts on the making of films.
For you as the composer, what are some of the pros and cons of working with notable financial limitations?
I can’t say the exact budget for the movie because that hasn’t been announced, and it’s certainly not my place to announce it. I know you weren’t asking, but in general, we were working with a very limited budget. We did have limitations. And I think there are pros and cons, as you said. I think when people have limitations, they find really interesting and fun ways to get around those limitations.
Musically, the budget restrictions on this movie led me to find some really interesting ways to write music that I might not have come up with if I had an entire orchestra. I think there’s a really unique sound to this movie because so many of the instruments on this soundtrack are just me layered two dozen times. The choir, for example, it’s me. It has a really unique sound that maybe a full choir and a really nice recording studio might not have had. Like, it’s very close. They’re like, right there next to you. Instead of being a big choir up on stage or something with that unique sound. Those are the kind of fun things that we came up with and thought about that bring a scope within budget restrictions.
But then the other part that is the downside to having a limited budget is time. With more budget, you have more time to get that really good take or get that location or wait for the right lighting or something like that. And musically, it’s the same way. There’s a moment in this score where we just had no more time, and I had to take a piece of music from one scene and make it work in another scene. There was some music in there, but it just wasn’t right, you know? And we just didn’t really have time to go and write a brand new thing for a scene that needed to be done the next day. So we took a piece from the pool scene, and we put it when the guys in the woods are beating up on Pooh, and it works really well. But I’ve had some comments on my YouTube going, is this the part that’s also in the woods? And it’s like, “Oh, they caught me!” [Laughs]
I did spend a little bit for a really fantastic violinist named Clejan. He’s on TikTok and Instagram as The Trap Violinist. And he does trap music and plays the violin. I love him. He’s fantastic. And I got him to play at the end here during an emotionally climactic scene because it was really important for me to get somebody who can really play the violin. It’s really beautiful.
I think, just in general, the answer is time. With a limited budget, the challenge is time. But then, at the same time, you come up with interesting ways to get around that or to make it work. Like Vince Knight, the cinematographer, is so talented and getting a lot of praise on his cinematography for this movie. It looks fantastic in spite of us being a micro-budget movie, you know what I’m saying?
That’s such a valuable skill to have that doesn’t get talked about enough. It’s one thing to make something sound or look incredible when you have all the options at your disposal, but it’s a completely different skill to make something look amazing with two lights or whatever.
And I will say a lot of that comes from Rhys and Scott. They are really smart at using the budget in ways that bring value to the movie. Something I heard Scott say recently in an interview that I loved is instead of going to film school or doing one movie and trying to go to Sundance, he made a goal for himself that he was gonna make like a hundred movies before he was 30. And he did it. He accomplished that goal.
And what he learned from that is, “Let’s bring as much production value as we can on the limitations of the investors.” You don’t have a choice in how much money you get for a budget. You only have how much you get from people who are investing in you. Rhys and Scott are really good at making that investment look like even more.
Ok, so you brought up TikTok a second ago, and we have to talk about your own little TikTok star — The Beehiveolin. Tell us about this famous instrument from WINNIE THE POOH: BLOOD AND HONEY.
I was joking with the guys yesterday that the Beehiveolin is gonna start doing interviews. [Laughs] What I was trying to do was to play into the fun that they were having on set. Like, I watched the rough cut, and between takes, they were all laughing. Everyone had a blast on this movie, and it was just so contagious. I wanted to be part of the fun, but I sit in my studio alone. I don’t get to go on set and have fun making a movie with people.
So when I first signed on to this movie, I remembered an article from The New Yorker about an experimental violinist named Tyler Thackray. And, I remembered one sentence that said he had put a violin inside of a beehive to see what would happen. And so I reached out to him and said, “Do you still have that violin?” And he goes, “Oh, yeah. I forgot about that.” Like, he had forgotten that he had put the violin in the beehive. And it had been in there for two years.
Whoa.
I thought I would just borrow it for a while and give it back, but I’m so grateful that this was given to me by Tyler. It’s really a piece of art. I assumed that I would get to play it like a normal violin and that I would have to put plastic on my floor because of honey dripping everywhere. I thought it would just be a fun way to get into the absurdity that this movie is. But I didn’t expect that it would sound different than a normal violin.
Not only is there honeycomb on the outside, but the entire inside of the violin is covered in honeycomb. That’s when I started to get really excited. I can’t even hold it like a normal violin because of the beehive frame that it’s in. I had to play it on a tabletop, which also changed the way that I think about how to play it.
It’s so perfect for this film — vaguely familiar, but completely different.
Yeah! It’s nasally and grainy and less resonant, which for some reason brings out some overtones. I’d be playing it and it would sometimes go wild. What I really love about this instrument is when I discovered that, it was, “What happens when I layer more than one on top of itself?” To me it sounds like bees buzzing. It feels like a swarming hive.
So, they have announced that there will be a sequel to WINNIE THE POOH: BLOOD AND HONEY. Do you know if you’re coming back? If not yet, would you like to return to 100 Acre Wood?
I would certainly love to.
WINNIE THE POOH: BLOOD AND HONEY is currently playing in select theaters nationwide. In addition, Bell’s score for the film is now available digitally through all major streaming platforms which you can find here. You can also follow the Beehiveolin, er, Bell…on TikTok at @andrewscottbell
Tags: A.A. Milne, Amber Doig-Thorne, Andrew Scott Bell, Christopher Robin, Craig David Dowsett, Horror, Interviews, music, Natasha Tosini, Piglet, Pooh, Rachel Reeves, Rhys Frake-Waterfield, Winnie the Pooh
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