Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare (2025) – You Can Fly

Released: 27th Feburary
Seen: 1st October

The Twisted Childhood Universe is the name given to the movie franchise that’s slowly being created which takes public domain fairy tale characters and turns them into horror movies. It’s a universe brought to you by the Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey people and when they first announced that this was a thing they were doing, the internet collectively groaned because the idea sounded painful and we had all suffered through the first movie which was a steaming heap of garbage. Then they released Blood and Honey 2, a marked improvement on the original that proved the actual potential of this stupid concept. Of course those were still early test films, they were banking off the Winnie the Pooh as a killer idea and we didn’t have much information about how the full Poohniverse (The other nickname given to this universe) would fare… Well, now the first film that isn’t about the bear of very little brain has come out and folks, this might actually turn out OK.

Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare imagines a version of Peter Pan (Martin Portlock) who has not only grown up but isn’t so much bringing lost children to Neverland, more like kidnapping them and killing all their friends and family so they can go to ‘neverland’, which in this case is a drug fuelled fantasy place that Peter sees when he’s high on heroin, AKA Pixie Dust. Peter’s latest victim is a boy named Michael Darling (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney) and the only person who can save Michael from Peter’s evil clutches is his sister Wendy Darling (Megan Placito). In doing so Wendy will have to get past other people like Tinkerbell (Kit Green), a former lost boy who transitioned and is now hooked on ‘pixie dust’ but also believes fully in Peter, and Hook (Harry Whitfield), another ‘lost boy’ who Peter had disfigured and left with a hook for a hand. Will Wendy win and save Michael or will Peter’s plan work and his murder spree continue?

It’s fair to say that I went into this film expecting nothing. You have to remember this is part of the Poohniverse, the first film in that franchise was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen and while the second is a huge improvement it’s still just not something you expect to get anything of quality out of… so believe me I’m as shocked as anyone to say Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare is actually really fucking good. It’s kind of stunning how effectively they’ve taken the elements of the iconic Peter Pan story and managed to twist it into the stuff of nightmares without losing what makes it a Peter Pan story. It would be very easy to just have a psycho running around and kill people and name him Peter Pan and let that do the work but you can tell they’ve made sure to find the little things to link this to the original, from playing around with his shadow to the games he plays (which turn out terrifying) to how he talks to the kids he plans to take to Neverland. It feels like a demented version of Peter Pan, it’s stunning to realise that they pulled that off but they did. They took Peter Pan and made him the creepy guy in the van you warn your kids about so they don’t become lost children… It’s fucking brilliant in that regard.

It also helps that the performance of Peter Pan is actually terrifying. All praise to Martin Portlock, who clocked in to deliver an absolutely terrifying creation that feels like Pennywise if he did a meth binge and was a borderline pedophile. It’s absolutely fucking disturbing and only grows more frightening with every passing scene. It’s the performance the film basically lives or dies by and with his wild, insane choices, he gives the film more life than anyone would expect a film like this to get. His captivating menace permeates the Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare, every single frame that he’s in is unnerving and any frame that he isn’t in has you wondering where the hell he is.

Honestly everyone in Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare is delivering a better performance than you might think a film like this deserves, the kids deliver some truly great moments, the actress playing Wendy is a fantastic final girl character who hopefully will return in the Poohniverse and I have to give a special shout out to Kit Green as Tinkerbell because the idea of a drug addicted Tinkerbell could’ve failed so hard but in Kit’s hand, Tink is a tragic figure you want to see break free from Peter’s grasp. Also, nice to see a film just have a trans character as one of its main roles, Tink being trans is a bold choice that makes the character even more fascinating, on top of just letting the filmmakers prove that it’s pretty easy to have a trans character in a film if you actually try.

The fact that Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare just keeps impressing the more it goes on is really evidence that the people making it really did try to do something more than just cash in on something in the public domain. They did that already with the first Blood and Honey; it got the door open, and now they’re actually trying to do something interesting and fun. This dark, twisted take on Peter Pan doesn’t play safe with anything, it’s dark and grungy and plays around in taboos that other horror films avoid, but it does so with a surprising confidence. It also does it while looking pretty good, there are more than a few shots in here that are genuinely impressive in how they’re presented. Considering the micro-budget that this film had to work with, they made sure to get the most out of every shot, pouring everything they could onto the screen to make sure that eventually they got what they wanted. 

Look, Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare really shouldn’t have worked as well as it did but god damn if they didn’t pull some magic out of a hat. Considering it’s a low-budget film that’s a dark take on Peter Pan, for what it’s trying to be, it absolutely nails it. It’s the best possible iteration of a horror Peter Pan movie, with more than a few moments that will have you just staring in shock at what they’ve put on the screen. Is it a horror classic? No, I don’t think anything from the Poohniverse is going to be, and I don’t think that’s what they’re going for. It’s just a damn fun movie that delivers on exactly what it promises, which is more than a lot of other films can say.