That hunter never should have shot Bambi’s mother. In addition to traumatizing an entire generation of children—not to mention Bambi himself—he’s about to have the blood of at least three public domain stock characters on his hands. New twisted childhood slasher Bambi: The Reckoning posits that the beloved Disney fawn grew up to become a toothy, zombified cryptid, driven solely by his primal need for vengeance—which, frankly, makes a lot of sense. Witnessing your mother’s murder as a young child would screw you up for life (ask anyone who merely watched it on a screen), and someone should have to pay for that! That hunter is going to hell.
The film’s first trailer contains pretty much exactly what you’d expect—a.k.a. one very tenuous plot device, and a whole lot of blood. But we’re not here to debate the relative narrative merits of Bambi as a “vicious killing machine that lurks in the wilderness,” as producer Scott Jeffrey characterized in Jagged Edge’s announcement of the project three years ago (when Felix Salten’s book, Bambi, A Life In The Woods,entered the public domain). If you’ve ever wanted to see a formerly good and innocent Disney hero transform into a “mutated grief-stricken” decapitation device, go ahead and hit play.
As you likely already pieced together, Bambi: The Reckoning hails from Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and HoneyproducersJeffrey and Rhys-Frake Waterfield, along with director Dan Allen. The twisted horror romp was bizarrely popular at Cannes, with ITN studios winning the battle to distribute it in the United States. In addition to the CGI forest dweller, Bambi: The Reckoning also stars human actors Roxanne Mckee, Tom Mulheron, Nicola Wright, Samira Mighty, and Alex Cooke. Whoever survives Bambi’s wrath may be forced to contend with the twisted alter-egos of Pooh, Tinkerbell, Pinocchio, Peter Pan, Tigger, Piglet, The Mad Hatter, and Sleeping Beauty in the studio’s eventual Poohniverse: Monsters Assembleteam-up film. For now, they just have to get out of the forest when Bambi: The Reckoning charges into theaters summer 2025.
