‘Dust Bunny’ Rated R: Bryan Fuller Breaks Down the Gateway Horror Movie’s Mature Content
The horror genre has long wrung terror and depravity out of the most unlikely objects, but a thriller about a dangerous dust bunny has to be breaking some kind of record in this regard. “Dust Bunny,” a soon-to-be-released horror film in which a child must contend with this very real monster under her bed, is not a horror comedy and will play its premise wholly straight. Nonetheless, director Bryan Fuller was taken aback to learn that the MPAA doesn’t find his film to be nearly as kid-friendly as he intended.
A Semi-Family Film from the Showrunner of “Hannibal”
“Dust Bunny,” which premiered on September 9 at the Toronto International Film Festival and will be released wide on December 12, is the directorial debut of Bryan Fuller, who has done a lot of work over the past few decades as a television writer and creator. His writing credits include “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” (1997), “Star Trek: Voyager” (1997-2001), and the 2002 TV-film adaptation of Stephen King’s “Carrie.” As both writer and creator, he has been responsible for “Star Trek: Discovery” (2017-24), and he was both writer and showrunner of the “Hannibal” series (2013-15), which starred Mads Mikkelsen as the titular Dr. Lecter himself.
The premise of “Dust Bunny” is lighthearted without being overpoweringly silly: a 10-year-old child (Sophie Sloan) enlists the professional assassin (Mikkelsen) next door to slay the no-longer-proverbial menace that lurks beneath her bed. In a recent interview on the Horror Queers podcast, Fuller explained that he sees his first film as “a movie for the whole family… I definitely wanted it to be a gateway experience where 10-year-olds would see this movie and say, ‘Yes, give me more.'”
An MPAA Crackdown on an Independent Film
This, Fuller said, is why he felt both shocked and vexed when the MPAA slapped “Dust Bunny” with an R rating, citing what he called “the non-lethal toothbrush injury.” This injury is apparently the extent of the movie’s violence, and Fuller asserted that “Dust Bunny” contains no nudity or profanity, and by rights should be a PG-13 film. He stated that the MPAA’s “R” designation shows “how much stricter they are with independents than they are over studio fare,” bringing up the 2022 Blumhouse-produced, Universal Pictures-distributed “M3GAN” as an example of a much more violent horror flick that received this studio PG-13 pass.
Conclusion
All MPAA stringency aside, “Dust Bunny” is still shaping up to be quite a lovely success story. Courtesy of its TIFF premiere, it currently has a 93% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with critics praising the performances of (and chemistry between) Sloan and Mikkelsen, as well as its imaginativeness and gateway-horror charm. “So many people who have seen it feel like it’s a family film,” Fuller asserted in the Horror Queers interview, after which he sought to put a bright spin on the movie’s unjust rating: “I hope it’s a lot of kids’ first R-rated movie that they get to see and experience.”
