🧚‍♂️ Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare (2025)

The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up… Into Anything Good


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Lets start by showing y’all the trailers shall we?

🎬 Trailer

Sadly, the trailer tells you everything about this movie: grim fairy tale reimagining, “public domain horror” energy, and Peter Pan as a full-on child snatcher. Think “what if your bedtime story was actually an Amber Alert?”


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📖 Non-Spoiler Plot Overview

So the film takes Peter Pan — the boy who never grows up — and flips it into something grotesque: he’s not whimsical, he’s a predator who kidnaps kids and drags them into his twisted “Neverland.” Wendy? Gone. Tinker Bell? Creepy. Hook? Irrelevant. Instead, we follow a group of kids lured into a nightmare carnival-like setting where Peter’s obsession with keeping children “forever young” turns deadly.


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👥 Character Rundown

Peter Pan (Martin Portlock) – Forget Disney’s green tights. Here, he’s gaunt, predatory, and straight out of a nightmare. Basically Pennywise with wings clipped.

The Kids – Mostly plot devices. Terrified, confused, but never fleshed out (pun not intended).

Parents / Adults – Scattered around the edges, doing their best “horror movie parent panic” routine. Their purpose is to highlight that Peter is every parent’s worst nightmare.



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⏱️ Pacing / Episode Flow

For a 1 hr 30 min runtime, it feels long. The first act sets up the creepy premise decently, but the middle drags like molasses. It leans on jump scares and dim lighting instead of letting the dread breathe. The climax? Rushed chaos — like the filmmakers remembered, “Oh right, we need an ending.”


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👍 Pros

The concept is actually interesting. Twisting Peter Pan into a horror villain fits the wave of dark fairy tale retellings.

The poster art and carnival aesthetic? Creepy as hell. Atmosphere-wise, you feel the grime.

A couple of unsettling moments stick — Peter whispering about “never growing up” hits hard in a very wrong way.



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👎 Cons

The acting is a mixed bag. Portlock tries, but most of the cast feels like community theater thrown into a Saw spinoff.

The cinematography is… gray. Washed out, too dark, and trying too hard to be “gritty.”

The script feels rushed — instead of digging into lore or psychology, it goes for surface-level scares.

Tonal whiplash: is it exploitation horror? A social commentary? A creepypasta brought to life? The film never decides.



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💭 Final Thoughts

This should have been a creepy cult hit. Instead, it’s another entry in the “public domain horror cash-in” club (joining Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey). It’s not offensively bad, but it doesn’t rise above being a curiosity watch. More “oh, neat idea” than “must see.”


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⭐ Rating

5/10 – The idea had claws, but the film clipped them.


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⚠️ Spoiler Warning

Okay y’all, if you don’t want to know the specifics, skip now.

💀 Spoilers

The film starts with the disappearance of several kids from a small town. Their parents are frantic, the police are useless, and the whispers begin: something is luring children away. That “something” is revealed pretty quickly — Peter Pan, but not the Disney swashbuckler. He’s gaunt, pale, with sunken eyes, and a smile that feels more predatory than playful. He floats around carnival rides, promising kids they’ll “never grow up” if they come with him. Of course, they do.

Inside his twisted version of Neverland, the kids discover a rotting carnival. Tilt-a-whirls creak, funhouse mirrors distort into grotesque faces, and balloons (straight-up IT vibes) float everywhere. Instead of the whimsical Lost Boys, there are malformed, zombified children who’ve been trapped there for years. They’ve either forgotten who they were or been warped into something feral — more monsters than kids.

One subplot follows a boy named Jamie, who refuses to eat Peter’s “feast” (a clear parallel to Pan’s magical food in the original). Turns out, the food rots kids from the inside, binding them to Peter’s control. Jamie sees through the illusion, realizing it’s just maggot-filled garbage dressed up as a banquet. Gross.

Meanwhile, Peter grows more unhinged. His big reveal? He literally feeds off children’s youth. He doesn’t just keep them trapped; he drains them. When Wendy is mentioned in passing, he snarls, “She left me. She grew up. They always grow up.” That’s his trauma, his reason for becoming a monster — abandonment. So he makes sure no one leaves. Ever.

In the climax, Jamie and a few survivors find the hidden “nest” where Peter stores the husks of the kids he’s drained — basically mummified Lost Boys. It’s the one actually chilling set-piece in the whole movie. They try to destroy it by setting fire to the carnival, but Peter shrieks and literally snuffs the flames out by draining the life of one of the kids in front of them.

The final showdown? Jamie stabs Peter with a jagged carnival pole, but instead of dying, Peter laughs, coughing up black smoke and saying, “I’ll never grow up… and neither will you.” The remaining kids scatter. Jamie almost makes it out, only for Peter to drag him back into the darkness.

The kicker: the last scene shows another group of kids being lured by Peter’s voice, singing a twisted version of “You Can Fly” off-screen. The implication? This is an endless cycle. No matter what you do, Peter always finds more children.