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A killer Pinocchio is an easy sell. You can picture the poster before anyone builds the movie: strings, teeth, a splash of red across something that used to be sweet. The version Rhys Frake-Waterfield would rather talk about is the one underneath the poster, where the puppet does not arrive already knowing what evil is. He has to be taught it. That is the part that unsettles me, and it is the part he kept circling back to when we talked.
Frake-Waterfield wrote and directed Pinocchio: Unstrung, the fifth film in the Twisted Childhood Universe he launched with Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey. It reaches North American theaters July 24 through Viva Pictures. I had already seen it before we spoke, so I skipped the synopsis and asked him when the film stopped being about a killer doll and started being about a creation handed the wrong idea of good.
He Does Not Start Evil
“The film itself doesn’t start evil,” he said, and then he laid out the actual engine of the thing. On the surface it is a puppet going, in his words, absolutely mad and killing a lot of people. Beneath that is something quieter. “The general message behind it is about how the voices which surround children can shape their understanding of the world, and lean them down different paths.”
Pinocchio, the way he tells it, shows up with nothing. No priors, no compass, everything brand new to him. The people around him start filling that blank in, teaching him what a person even is, right down to hair and eyes and teeth, and he swallows all of it because he has no reason yet to doubt anyone. Then the wrong teachers get their turn. Robert Englund voices the Cricket, and this Cricket is not the little conscience perched on a shoulder. He is one of the voices doing the corrupting.
The design detail that stuck with me is that the body keeps score. Everyone knows the nose grows when he lies. What I did not know until he told me is hidden in the sound mix. “As his nose is growing longer, almost like an element of puberty, his voice is deepening as well.” The moral rot has a pitch to it. He gets worse, and you can hear him getting worse.
He Is Not Done Raiding the Nursery
I have been following this franchise since Blood and Honey, and I told him the honest version of what I think, which is that each entry keeps getting more complicated and more competent while the elevator pitch stays exactly the same. So I asked the obvious thing. Does he feel any pressure to grow out of the childhood-stories well, or is he content where he is. He is content with it.
He talked about the ceiling on these films being enormous, about tales that have been retold for hundreds of years still holding room nobody has used. He reached for del Toro’s Pinocchio as proof, a story you would swear was spent, rebuilt from the ground into something strange and new. His own swing was to poison the helpers. “I didn’t want the Blue Fairy to be good. I didn’t want the Cricket to be good, I wanted to make them these malevolent voices.” Take the characters who exist to steer the boy right and make them the reason he goes wrong.
Built to Stand in the Room
The other thing I care about, and said so, is that the puppet is practical. CGI would have been easier and he knows it. “I wanted to do practical because I felt craftsmanship was quite fundamental to the story of it.” Then he walked me through how far he pushed that. The storybook prologue is shadow puppetry he cut out by hand and shot against a screen. The title card is practical. The puppet itself is a full animatronic from Todd Masters’ shop, the crew behind Slither and the creature work on Tales from the Crypt. Even the closing credits get shoved along the screen by Pinocchio’s wooden hand.
He framed part of the choice as survival. “I think that’s quite helpful in the world of AI right now, to make the film quite distinctive and give it an identity, because that crafty and kookiness to it is just so hard to replicate digitally.” He also believes horror fans catch the difference on instinct, in the way real light falls across a real surface, in how practical blood actually moves. He is not wrong about that. I caught it.
Five or Six People and a Nightmare
None of it comes free. Ask him what an audience will never guess was difficult and he goes straight at the puppet. “I can’t emphasize how hard puppets are to work with.” Getting Pinocchio to do a single convincing thing takes a crowd, he explained: someone underneath carrying his weight, someone on each limb, two more on remote controls driving the animatronics in his face. It can be, in his words, an absolute nightmare, and it gets worse the tighter the schedule and the budget.
The sequence he named as the hardest is the hospital scene, Richard Brake’s Geppetto nowhere near it, the puppet doing the sort of work the film’s rating exists for. He would not let me romanticize it. With the puppet perched on top of an actor and going after what is inside him, the real job becomes hiding half a dozen operators just out of frame, choosing which side of the line to shoot so none of them show, cheating every element at once. I am not going to tell you how the scene resolves. I will tell you it worked on me, and that it took a small army under the table to get it there.
The Body Reports the Damage
He sounded a little surprised by his own movie, and admitted the whole thing turned out bigger than he expected walking in. I came around on it too, which I got into elsewhere. What stays with me is how literal the film is about cause and effect. He is not born cruel. He is talked into it, and the wood keeps the receipts: the nose, the dropping voice, a boy-shaped thing looking less like a boy the further down he slides. Strip the gore and Pinocchio: Unstrung is a fight over who gets to teach a brand-new mind what good means. Then it puts the gore back, because it is still very much that kind of movie.