‘Dust Bunny’ on HBO Max is the best gateway horror movie for kids in quite some time

For some kids and parents, the idea of “gateway horror” – horror movies or shows that can open up a path toward the sometimes-disreputable horror lifestyle, one of the most acquired tastes in popular culture – is an exercise in baffling futility. You spend some degree of time and awareness attempting to avoid shows and movies that will give your kids nightmares, right? Plus, if you have seen a bunch of horror movies, you might recall the perils of opening a gateway.

But the fact is, there will always be some younger audiences who are Horror Kids: Future horror fans who are fascinated by the macabre, the spooky, or the otherwise freaky. Parents of Horror Kids don’t necessarily want to immerse them in all of the classics right away, because some of the classics are genuinely disturbing or feature themes and stories that a younger kid might not be able to handle. But they also shouldn’t ignore a burgeoning interest in a genre that can be a great outlet for fears and anxieties (and, of course, if you’re not careful, a prominent cause of same).

The interest in potential gateway horror is what accounts for roughly ninety percent of the most forgiving reviews of the Five Nights at Freddy’s film series. Kids already love the game, set at a haunted Chuck E. Cheese-like restaurant, and while the movies aren’t especially well-written, well-directed, smart, or even scary, their PG-13 take on the slasher and/or creature feature has its place. At least, that’s how the reasoning goes. The thing is, though, there’s no real reason to suggest that a kid watch a horror movie that bad – not bad as in transgressive, but bad as in written by the video game’s not particularly cinema-literate creator who insists on full creative control. If the child is already interested in Five Nights at Freddy’s, of course, by all means, fire up Peacock. (The recent sequel has been dominating the streaming charts there for weeks.) It’s not going to give many prospective Horror Kids childhood-ruining nightmares. But HBO Max is currently hosting another chart-topper that’s a far better gateway-horror movie: Bryan Fuller’s Dust Bunny.

Fuller may be best-known as the mind behind the TV adaptation of Hannibal, a cultishly adored three-season series about the serial killer once played by Anthony Hopkins and played in the show by Mads Mikkelsen – who also stars in Dust Bunny. But Fuller’s feature debut (after years of genre-related TV work) isn’t nearly as gory as his Hannibal show, despite the R rating it received. It’s more on the Tim Burton end of things, fairly appropriate for older fans of the Burton-produced Wednesday or its Netflix stablemate Stranger Things (a show that may have single-handedly created more Horror Kids than anything in a generation).

Mikkelsen does play a killer, though not one quite so diabolical as Hannibal. He’s the anonymous Resident 5B, a hitman who lives in the same apartment building as Aurora (Sophie Sloan), a young girl whose foster parents are killed by the monster who lives under her bed, or so she claims. (They’re definitely dead, but what happened to them remains largely offscreen, maintaining Aurora’s subjectivity.) Thinking that she’s seen Resident 5B kill a similar monster – actually a gang of humans wearing a dragon-dance puppet/costume in Chinatown – Aurora attempts to hire him to vanquish her foe. 5B doesn’t believe that the monster exists, but he does believe that she may need protection from other criminals descending on their apartment building, and the two form a bond amidst a fair bit of stylized violence.

Dust Bunny ultimately has as much action and fantasy as horror, but the horror elements are most memorable – and give the story permission to go a little further than it otherwise might. Most of Fuller’s TV work has featured some manner of dark whimsy, and also like Tim Burton, here he creates a heightened reality with sharp edges. What the movie has over the Five Nights at Freddy’s movies – apart from better production design, stronger performances, and more overall imagination – is the sense that this stylized world matters beyond the delivery of lore. Visually speaking, this is a far less realistic movie than either Five Nights at Freddy’s, yet emotionally it feels far more complete and believable. Fuller’s TV origins lend him a greater understanding of cinema than the Five Nights creator’s time as a game designer.

Despite this, there are times when Dust Bunny does feel like an overextended TV episode; it likely would have played beautifully as an installment of an anthology series like Amazing Stories. In fact, that’s exactly where Fuller’s idea originated; that series was revived for Apple a few years ago, and Dust Bunny was originally pitched as a possibility for that. Expanded well past the 90-minute mark with a relatively small cast of characters, it sometimes repeats itself. But Mikkelsen and Sloan are well-matched, and the runtime also gives younger viewers some time to sink into the movie’s weird little world.

Dust Bunny is not for kids, exactly. But it understands kids – their fears, their determination, their resourcefulness – in a way that a lot of family-oriented movies do not. If you’re the parent or guardian to a tween who can handle the danger and occasional gore of Stranger Things, the macabre storytelling of Wednesday, or the creature mayhem of something like Gremlins (or, sure, Five Nights at Freddy’s), Fuller’s movie is gateway horror you can probably safely leave open.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
Stream Dust Bunny on HBO Max