It’s a new rite of passage for beloved animated characters: once their copyright expires and they pass into the public domain, they are ready for a new direction: a career in the horror genre.

Winnie the Pooh (and Piglet too!) entered the public domain at the beginning of this year, and they will soon debut in the slasher Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood and Honey, coming to a theater near you courtesy of Fathom Events on February 15th, 2023.

That film, directed by Rhys Frake-Waterfield, finds Pooh and Piglet going feral after Christopher Robin abandons them 100 Acre Wood, making them embark on a killing spree. Christopher and a group of young women staying in a nearby home are the targets of their murderous rage.

Frake-Waterfield will see if lightning strikes in the same place twice when he produces Bambi: The Reckoning, this time with director Scott Jeffrey (The Mutation) behind the camera. The idea for this film, according to Jeffrey, is inspired by the 2017 film The Ritual, a movie about a group of men hunted by a terrifying monster while hiking through the Swedish wilderness.

Jeffrey told Dread Central, “The film will be an incredibly dark retelling of the 1928 story we all know and love. Finding inspiration from the design used in Netflix’s The Ritual, Bambi will be a vicious killing machine that lurks in the wilderness. Prepare for Bambi on rabies!” Cool.

The Bambi that you are probably most familiar with is the 1942 Disney animated movie, which adapted the 1923 book Bambi, a Life in the Woods by Austrian author and hunter Felix Salten. It’s the story of a young deer growing up in the forest, learning to survive after the death of his mother with the help of his animal friends Thumper the rabbit and Flower the skunk. The only killing machine in that movie is Man, so perhaps it’s high time the animals get theirs.

Disney announced plans to do a live-action retelling of Bambi back in 2020, long before the copyright expired on the character, but that project has yet to materialize.

The next Disney character to enter public domain, in case Frake-Waterfield is going for a trilogy of sorts, is Disney’s early version of Mickey Mouse. It’s a safe bet that somewhere, a screenwriter is polishing a treatment for Screamboat Willie.