Hannibal creator Bryan Fuller hopes his feature film directorial debut, Dust Bunny, not only entertains the crowds, but cements itself as the perfect gateway into horror for newbies. The movie finds Aurora (Sophie Sloan), a 10-year-old girl convinced that a monster lurking under the apartment floors devoured her parents. She enlists her mysterious neighbor (Mads Mikkelsen) – a hitman, no less – to help slay the big, bad bunny. But there’s more to the fluffy creepy critter than just a ravenous appetite.
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Although Dust Bunny doesn’t hop into theaters until December 5th, ComicBook.com sat down with Fuller the day after its TIFF Midnight Madness premiere. Labelled “a family-friendly horror,” Dust Bunny may owe some of its whimsical macabre charm to a horde of mischievous Mogwai.
“There were so many wonderful things about the summer of ’84,” Fuller says. “Everybody was going on about Ghostbusters, which I also loved. But there was something about the family story of Gremlins, particularly with the mom in the house, alone with the monsters, where she is a final girl and gets all the final girl moments and gets to fight back and be resourceful. You think that she is Suzy Homemaker, but this is a woman who not only grabbed one knife, but grabbed another knife and weaponized a microwave, weaponized a blender. She did these things that were so wonderfully specific in the genre that made it about her choices in a way that we were like, ‘Oh no, she is vulnerable and needs to be saved at some point, but she is scrappy as hell.’
“That is a section of the movie that is solid horror, but there’s also Christmas cookies and exploding Gremlins, blended Gremlins, that made it fun,” he continues. “It takes you to a place where you can laugh and scream, as well as be terrified for this woman’s life. We are the exact same running time as Gremlins. The conversation that I had with Lisa Lassek, the editor, quite a bit is it’s such an efficiently told movie. There is no fat on that bone. It is a really tight script. It hits emotional points. You care about these people. We were like, ‘Let’s keep it at a clean hour and 46, and take a tip from Joe Dante.’”
Dust Bunny’s opening doesn’t immediately jump into the scares. In fact, that sequence feels more Big Trouble in Little China than anything else. The film unquestionably defies genres and Fuller reveled in throwing all those influences and visual cues into the mix.
“I love Big Trouble in Little China,” Fuller explains. “I think John Carpenter has some perfect movies. I would say his perfect movies are Halloween, Big Trouble in Little China. I think Starman is such a beautiful film. Initially, I was like, ‘F–k you, Starman. You are not E.T.’ I saw it and was like, ‘This is so beautiful and different and emotional in a different way.’ Big Trouble in Little China was definitely one of them.”
“The Coen Brothers and their collaboration with Barry Sonnenfeld, as well as Barry Sonnenfeld as a director…I just adored making Pushing Daisies with him that I see a lot of Pushing Daisies shots in it,” he says. “I see John Carpenter shots with the Halloween mask. There’s a Jaws shot in it. It’s Roy Schneider, sitting at the front of the boat, when Mads gets up off the floor in the bathroom. It is fun to work with film geeks, who we can say, ‘It’s the Jaws shot,’ and everybody knows exactly what I am talking about. Then, we just keep building on that. There are so many genre influences and elements in it. When the mayhem erupts in the movie, that is a big Gremlins influence. I think emotionally and stylistically, we are the City of Lost Children. We are the Delicatessen.”
Dust Bunny officially premieres on December 5th.
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Image courtesy of Focus Features.
