While not a new conceit, public domain horror turned a corner with Rhys Frake-Waterfield’s 2023 film “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey.” Frake-Waterfield transformed the cozy tale about a cuddly bear who loves honey into a gooey slasher and a surprising box office success. The film grossed $2 million domestically and $7.7 million globally, something no one expected.
Numerous filmmakers took that as a sign and plunged into the deep end with horror retellings of their very own. Public domain horror saw a renaissance that’s led to the likes of Mickey Mouse, Betty Boop, Peter Pan, The Grinch, Pinnochio, Aladdin and even Bambi forged into frightening tales of the deranged and the macabre. Many moviegoers would probably say their childhoods have been ruined, but others would disagree.
The added layer of horror over classic IPs allows for wildly different perspectives on the material. In some cases, it also returns beloved stories, some of which Disney cemented into pop culture canon with their signature animation, to their “Grimms’ Fairy Tales” roots. There’s one upcoming public domain horror film that’s just as twisted as the last—and it takes cues directly from its source material.
‘Wizard of Oz’ Gets a Gen Z Retelling
“Dorothy: The Haunting of Oz” comes from first-time feature film director Elijah Alvarez on his newly launched Buddy Pictures. The cast includes Adrienne Tabag, Caia Bonner, Jordan Sklansky, Aziah King, Andrew Wang and Thomas Shan.
Alvarez’s take on “Wizard of Oz” stemmed from a very simple question: Which timeline are we in? The writer/director creates an “emotional atmosphere” rooted in the suffocating sense that the “world that looks familiar, but feels wrong in ways they can’t fully explain,” Alvarez tells EntertainmentNow. The horror isn’t “just about a witch or a curse. It is about disorientation, about waking up in a life that no longer feels aligned with who you are or what you believed the world was supposed to be.”
EntertainmentNowThe characters, which include Melanie, the film’s primary focus, find themselves tangled in a web of violence, betrayal, grief and the “strange modern feeling that reality itself has slipped out of place. I wanted the film to hold that unsettling, almost dream-like ache, the feeling of being trapped in the wrong version of your own life,” he continues. “Melanie especially lives inside that tension. She is trying to make sense of what love, identity and memory are to her in a world that has already taught her distortion.”
The Wicked Witch of the West then feeds on confusion, pain and the turmoil born out of those tornado-like feelings. “At the same time, the film is deeply human,” Alvarez notes. “It is about young people carrying inherited damage, trying to connect in a generation shaped by doomscrolling, views, emotional fragmentation and constant exposure to other people’s ruin.”
EntertainmentNow“Dorothy: The Haunting of Oz” toys with intimacy versus surrealism and external horror versus internal horror. “It is about what happens when your inner life and the world around you stop matching and how frightening it can be to realize you are still expected to keep going anyway,” he says. The film also mixes “raw emotion, sad personal memory, everyday humor and viral horror energy” into an unexpected human story about what life is like for Gen Z in 2026.
“We are all living inside this noise, this contradiction and system of the internet,” Alvarez adds. “‘Dorothy: The Haunting of Oz’ is my way of turning that and holding a mirror up to a horror story with heart.”
Official Teaser Feels Akin to ‘Return to Oz’
The official teaser appears as a modern update to Walter Murch’s 1985 film “Return to Oz,” which serves as a sequel to 1939’s “The Wizard of Oz” while also leaning into the source material, L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.” Ghoulish imagery mingles with the whimsy and magic of the landmark original film without sacrificing either for the sake of the other.
Set around Halloween, a viral internet challenge summons The Wicked Witch and Dorothy to a college town nestled in Northern California. A group of basketball players struggles to deal with grief and unimaginable injuries that threaten their athletic futures.
Melanie lies at the film’s heart as she also contends with her own past and how to move forward. Director Elijah Alvarez pulls inspiration from George Lucas’ 1973 film, “American Graffiti,” specifically referencing how he told the story “about the youth of his era in his own voice.”
