Into the Poohniverse: Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare

The Twisted Childhood Universe, or Poohniverse, is a collection of movies where wonderful, colorful, and, most importantly, public domain children’s characters kill people.

The brainchild of British filmmaker Rhys Frake-Waterfield, the cinematic universe is populated (and will be populated by) characters like Winnie-the-Pooh, Peter Pan, Pinocchio, Bambi, and Mary Poppins, among others, all given a dark makeover and murderous intent.

Into the Poohniverse is Film Inquiry’s look at these movies as the cinematic universe expands and the death toll rises.

Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare

And here we are at the first non-Blood and Honey entry in the expanded Poohniverse, Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare.

Peter Pan, the character, has always had a dark streak that has been filed down by adaptations. He kidnaps children and culls his lost boys when they grow up too much. He is an eternal child with all of the cruelty and dismissiveness of others’ feelings that comes with that, and a big part of his story is flying into the windows of children’s bedrooms to take them away from their homes. A perfect main character for a horror movie, then.

The Poohniverse is never going to be known as the most subtle franchise, and Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare accepts that and runs with it. In the Blood and Honey duology, cuddly childhood animal friends are now murderous monsters. In Neverland Nightmare, our villain is a child-stealing/murdering Peter Pan and his accomplice, Tinker Bell, a trans woman previously kidnapped by Peter when she was young.

You have to wonder what J.M. Barrie would think of all this.

Neverland Nightmare follows Wendy Darling (Megan Placito), whose brother Michael (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney) is taken by Peter. A particularly chilling moment has Peter calling the panicking Darling family after the fact to mock them and tell them that he will take Michael to Neverland. Wendy, blamed for the kidnapping by her mother (Teresa Banham, Christopher Robin’s therapist from Blood and Honey 2) because she got distracted during school pick-up, endeavors to find Michael with the help of her friend, Tiger Lily (Olumide Olorunfemi).

As with Blood and Honey, the movie excels during its set pieces. A bus massacre, a home invasion, and a chilling game of hide and seek are all crafted expertly for maximum gore and shock. It’s when the movie slows down that it falters, and it becomes clear that dialogue and acting are not what the Poohniverse is really about. The problem here, though, is that while in the Blood and Honeys the set pieces came thick and fast and featured different antagonists, Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare has a single villain and understands that when it comes to stabbing rampages, less is more. But it’s also still less.

Wendy also isn’t the most active of protagonists, and in the end, she’s simply in the right place at the right time to find out where Peter is keeping Michael, just in time for the big finale. 

It speaks to a problem with this movie and Blood and Honey 2, where the villains and the hero spend the movie circling each other until they collide at the end. In the meantime, the filmmakers find ways to inject some gore and horror into the proceedings, but it would have been fun to see a more active protagonist in Wendy Darling rather than her simply moping around until she just happens to be in the house of the next child Peter wants to kidnap.

Speaking of that finale, though, it is relentless. Thirty-something minutes of intense violence and blood-letting with jumpscares, reveals, and moments that made me wince with their gory intensity. The hour leading up to it is a bit of a slog, but once the characters reach the fireworks factory, it is all gas and no brakes until the final frame.

Much like the previous installments of the Poohniverse, there is a lot of stuff to like, and the filmmaker’s adeptness with choosing shots and design work is still excellent. Peter Pan’s hideout is a wonderful maze of filthy rooms and freaky circus imagery that’s so well-put-together, the shots in that location almost have a smell to them.

There is also a reveal toward the end of an incredible-looking character that we don’t get much of, but what we do see is fantastic, and it left me wanting more of that character in the inevitable sequel.

In terms of this movie’s place in the Poohniverse, director Scott Chambers is not shy about dropping an Easter egg or two. The ones I caught were a character in a Blood and Honey T-shirt (or maybe it’s the in-universe Honey and Blood?), a bookshelf where each book has the name of a Poohniverse movie, a quick trip to Ashford where Blood and Honey is set, and cameos from characters from those movies as well.

The quality of the acting jumps around from character to character, but Martin Porlock and Kit Green are standouts as Peter and Tinker Bell. Porlock plays Peter as a mix of Pennywise, Heath Ledger’s Joker, and the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and retains a level of unpredictable violence about him that is chilling. Kit Green is heartbreaking as the tragic Tinker Bell, who is shunned from Neverland for not being a boy, having transitioned since her kidnapping. It’s a low bar to clear, but having a trans woman play a trans woman is definitely not nothing, and Green’s performance is excellent.

The Poohniverse is such an interesting franchise in that each film is doing something that seems crass and pointless, but they’re taking the ideas in original directions. Blood and Honey 2 moved the genre toward something closer to sci-fi and added some world-building, while Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare takes the original text, strips out the whimsy, and replaces it with the harsh reality that people who steal children from their beds are probably the villains of any story they appear in.