A wooden boy who harvests human organs to become "real" arrived in North American cinemas on 24 July 2026, courtesy of British indie director Rhys Frake-Waterfield. Pinocchio: Unstrung is the latest entry in Frake-Waterfield's "Twisted Childhood Universe" — a slate of horror films that turn public-domain children's characters into killers, launched by his 2023 breakout Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey (Variety).

The premise is exactly what the title suggests. Pinocchio is a killer puppet, crafted deliberately by Geppetto — here a wealthy British inventor reimagined as a mad-scientist type in a contemporary London setting. Geppetto builds Pinocchio in an attempt to create artificial life; the puppet concludes that the path to becoming human runs through other people's organs. The action unfolds inside an elite London prep school, where one set-piece kill involves a treadmill and falling weights in the school gym (Variety; Deadline).

Richard Brake, a Game of Thrones alum, plays Geppetto. Cameron Bell appears as Geppetto's grandson James. Robert Englund — Freddy Krueger himself — is cast as a sinister Cricket character, a dark inversion of the talking cricket who guides the original Pinocchio (Variety; Deadline; Variety, 2024).

What sets the film apart from a CG-saturated horror market is its reliance on practical craft. The Pinocchio design uses puppetry and animatronics rather than computer-generated imagery, and the gore effects are described as practical, organic, and old-school. The film opens with an animated prologue styled as shadow theatre, laying out Pinocchio's backstory. Behind-the-scenes footage of the puppetry and animatronic work runs through the closing credits, giving audiences a look at the physical builds powering the kills (Variety).

Frake-Waterfield also wrote the script, which the Variety review describes as "semi-coherent." That is the review's assessment, not ours — the verdict on whether the film works is somebody else's page. What is verifiable is the release infrastructure: Viva Pictures and Altitude are handling the North American theatrical distribution, with the opening set for 24 July 2026 (Variety; Variety). A first trailer dropped by early March 2026 (Variety).

For context, this is not the Pinocchio that won an Academy Award. Guillermo del Toro's stop-motion Pinocchio took the Oscar for Best Animated Feature in 2022. Frake-Waterfield's version operates in a different register entirely — low-budget, practical-effects horror built on characters whose copyrights have lapsed into the public domain (Variety).

The "Twisted Childhood Universe" now spans multiple films, each taking a familiar children's property into slasher territory. Pinocchio: Unstrung is the latest to reach screens, and the behind-the-scenes credit footage suggests Frake-Waterfield is as keen to show the craft as the carnage.