[Editor's note: The following contains spoilers for Winnie the Pooh Blood and Honey.]In Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, A. A. Milne’s Pooh and Piglet get a horror makeover. Gone are the beloved cuddly teddy bear and tiny soft-spoken pig. In this film, they’re ruthless killers.

When Pooh, Piglet, and the other Hundred Acre Wood residents are abandoned by Christopher Robin (Nikolai Leon), they struggle to fend for themselves. While suffering extreme starvation, Pooh makes the decision to kill and eat Eeyore. Ever since, Pooh and Piglet operate as feral, bloodthirsty creatures who hate human beings.

Those right there are the broad strokes for Blood and Honey's rendition of the characters, but there are still a number of unanswered questions pertaining to what exactly these creatures are and how they operate. During a recent interview, Blood and Honey director Rhys Frake-Waterfield took some time to answer those burning questions and to tease how he hopes to expand the characters and their mythology in the sequel.

In Blood and Honey, Pooh and Piglet are more human-like than the versions of the characters presented in the source material (and the untouchable extension of that source material still protected by copyright law). But, they’re not human beings wearing bear and pig masks, right? “Yeah, that's right.” Frake-Waterfield added, “This is actually Winnie the Pooh and Piglet going around killing people.”

He went on to explain why it was important to make his versions of Pooh and Piglet more humanoid than bear and pig-like:

“I hate this word and I might not be able to say it — anthropomorphic. Basically hybrids. Half-bear, half-man, and half-pig, half-[man]. So that was a decision because I really wanted them to have the ability to hold weapons. So if I made Winnie the Pooh just a bear, he's got paws. All he will do is go around swiping people and killing them, maybe bite them. But with hands it becomes so much more fun because he has weapons, he can drive a car, I can do all these really interesting things.”

In addition to being a mix of human and bear, Frake-Waterfield’s Pooh also has a touch of stuffed animal to him, too. He explained:

“Inside they are a mix of human and a kind of Pooh bear interior. So they've got the blood, the’ve got the guts, but there's a bit of fluff floating around as well. And there's actually a moment in the film, if you watch carefully … after [Pooh's] been hit by the car and he's slumped over it, you'll see Christopher goes to save Maria and then [Pooh] coughs and when he coughs, if you look carefully, fluff’s coming out.”

While Pooh can be stopped momentarily, given what he goes through in the film, it seems as those he’s unkillable. Is that the case? Is Frake-Waterfield’s Pooh immortal? Here’s what he said:

"Pooh is a bit of a juggernaut. You can see, the amount he goes through, gets hit by a car and even that only creates a bit of a limp on his leg for a moment. So he's very, very difficult to stop. And I'm gonna flesh out more [about] how difficult he is to hold off in the sequel, I think. Piglet you can see was a bit easier to take control of.”

At one point in the film, Alice (Amber Doig-Thorne) is able to capture Piglet and proceeds to beat him with his sledgehammer. Unfortunately, Alice’s victory is short-lived because Pooh arrives on the scene and makes her his next victim. But what becomes of Piglet? We never see him again in the film, so did Alice really kill him? Here’s what Frake-Waterfield had to say about that:

“Piglet’s not dead. No. You can't kill Piglet. Him and Pooh are kind of the original two. And then in the sequel [I’m] going to add a few more characters in with them. So they're gonna go around and they’ll be as a group killing people.”

In addition to killing victims with brute force, Pooh and Piglet also have certain weapons and powers at their disposal. For example, Frake-Waterfield’s Winnie the Pooh can control bees.

“With Pooh, obviously there's that moment where he's controlling bees, and I thought the whole bee dynamic was really interesting just to put it in there and see what people thought about it. I can remove it in the second one if people don't like it, but there's a lot of points throughout the film where you'll notice little bees are flying around, or they're sort of placed in certain areas. So one particular example is when Natasha’s in the jacuzzi and she's enjoying herself, there’s a little bee which flies in and then it flies off. It's basically scouted out the area for Pooh, found her, and then gone back and told Pooh and said, Natasha’s in the jacuzzi, go and get her. [Laughs] And then shortly after, Pooh appears. So they're kind of like his scouts. But then at the end there's that moment where he obviously controls a swarm of them.”

If Pooh has such a power, does that mean Piglet has one as well? Frake-Waterfield replied:

“I tried to give them all differing weapons. So Piglet, he walks around and he loves his sledgehammer and he's always got the chains around him as well. When he ties up the girl, he hog-ties her and I thought that was a nice link to him being a pig. But he hasn't got, at the moment, or at least in the first one, we didn't really establish a power with him.”

While one might not expect a ton of depth from a horror twist on Winnie the Pooh, Frake-Waterfield did stress the importance of Pooh’s motive and how he hopes to expand the character’s goals in the sequel:

“So for Pooh, Christopher’s always been the one he’s kind of struggled to really get to the point of killing. And you can really see that in the torture scene. He's hitting him, he'll cause him pain, but he never goes to that level, or to that extreme. So I've kind of imagined his motive behind all of this is to essentially cause Christopher as much heartache and agony as he can, which is why he's really brutal to him at points. And you can see, when he's torturing and what he does to his engaged wife, he then showers him in blood, he then whips him, and then at the end with Maria, as they're having their intimate moment, he just wants to kill her in front of him. He's trying to cause a lot of suffering to Christopher, and that’s what's gonna be fleshed out more in the second.”

Looking for even more on the making of Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey? You can find just that in my full 25-minute conversation with Frake-Waterfield below: