Freddy's Voice, Geppetto's Nightmare: Pinocchio Hits Theaters This Week

He just wanted to be a real boy. Now he's taking body parts to prove it.

Pinocchio: Unstrung opens in theaters this Thursday, July 24 — and if early reviews are any indication, it's the horror event of the summer. Rhys Frake-Waterfield's fifth entry into the Twisted Childhood Universe (the franchise that gave you Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey) is drawing the most enthusiastic critical response the series has ever seen, with Cosmic Circus calling it "the Poohniverse's best story yet."

But the real twist? Robert Englund — the man behind Freddy Krueger — isn't playing the monster. He IS the monster. Just not the one you expect.

Freddy Becomes the Cricket

Englund voices the Cricket, the classic Pinocchio character reimagined as a sinister whispering devil on the puppet's shoulder. This isn't a helpful conscience nudging Pinocchio toward the right path. This Cricket drives Pinocchio toward bloodshed, feeding his obsession with becoming "real" and steering him away from every moral guardrail standing in the way.

It's a genuinely clever inversion — using Englund's iconic raspy menace to inhabit a character that's usually pure innocence. The Cricket doesn't wield a blade; he wields persuasion. And in this film's logic, that makes him more dangerous.

Richard Brake, no stranger to horror royalty himself (you know him from Halloween 2018, Mandy, Doom), plays Geppetto. Where the fairy tale gives us a tender craftsman who just wants a son, Brake plays a man consumed by grief and creation — a father figure whose love sets something terrible loose.

The Puppet Has a Plan

The plot follows James, a lonely boy taken in by his grandfather Geppetto after losing his parents. Geppetto introduces James to Pinocchio, a living wooden puppet he built. And Pinocchio has a problem: he wants to be a real boy more than anything. The Cricket has given him a simple solution. The difference between wooden dolls and living children, he's learned, is "organs and stuff."

What follows is a methodical, increasingly brutal horror film in which a handcrafted puppet dismantles human bodies in search of the flesh that will make him whole. It's body horror filtered through the logic of a fairy tale — and somehow, that makes it work.

Adding to the effect is the fact that Pinocchio isn't CGI. Emmy-winning practical effects artist Todd Masters (three-time Emmy winner) built a fully animatronic puppet for the film — a real physical creation that moves and unsettles in ways a digital character simply couldn't. The film committed to practical craft, and audiences are already responding to it.

The Twisted Childhood Universe's Defining Moment

Frake-Waterfield launched this franchise in 2023 by asking a deceptively simple question: what happens when beloved public domain characters outlive copyright protection? The answer was Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, a film that became a genuine phenomenon — not for being great cinema, but for being something the horror genre had never quite tried before.

Since then, the franchise has expanded through Bambi, Peter Pan, and others, building toward the promised crossover film Poohniverse: Monsters Assemble. Each installment has been a refinement — and according to early reviews, Pinocchio: Unstrung is where the formula finally clicks into place. Reviewers describe it as "emotionally grounded," "surprisingly sentimental," and "by far the strongest entry the series has produced."

The film also debuted to genuine festival enthusiasm, premiering at the Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival in April before securing wide distribution through Viva Pictures for North America and ITN Distribution worldwide.

Why This Matters for Horror

There's something genuinely interesting happening in this film beyond the gimmick. Horror has always loved subverting the safe and the beloved — nursery rhymes, lullabies, children's fairy tales carry dread precisely because we're wired to trust them. Pinocchio: Unstrung leans into that tradition with more craft than its predecessors.

Robert Englund voicing a corrupting influence is the kind of meta-casting that plays on decades of genre history. Richard Brake bringing gravitas to Geppetto asks the film to carry emotional weight alongside its gore. And a fully practical animatronic puppet performing violence in 2026 feels almost countercultural.

Pinocchio: Unstrung opens in theaters July 24. No strings attached.

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