Down The Rabbit Hole

Hannibal creator Bryan Fuller revisits childhood fears for Dust Bunny

- TARA BENNETT

MANY FILMMAKERS who were enamoured with – or slightly terrorised by – the films created by Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment are still trying to reproduce that shingle’s special alchemy of childlike wonder meets scares. It’s not easy to make the next Gremlins or Poltergeist, but it helped Bryan Fuller nail that Spielbergian tone that the filmmaker had a hand in his feature directing debut, Dust Bunny. It’s based on an original story that Fuller first developed for the 2020 Amazing Stories revival, and the director tells Red Alert that he’s thrilled his unproduced script eventually turned into his first film. “What was fun about it is that this is a story that Spielberg was involved in developing, so it has a bit of that direct-from-the-tap Amblin fairy dust that makes all of those movies so identifiable.”

Set in a more magical version of contemporary New York City, Dust Bunny is the story of old soul in a young body Aurora (Sophie Sloan). Convinced that a bunny-like monster lives under her bed, she’s exasperated her parents with her fears and rituals meant to prevent her demise. They ignore her – to their detriment – and she’s left to try and hire her enigmatic next-door neighbour (Mads Mikkelsen) to kill the beast. He thinks she’s crazy too... until he doesn’t.