Bryan Fuller's Dust Bunny is a weird and wonderful tale with one important lesson: "Believe children"

As horror takes on a new life in Hollywood, the demand for more NC-17 shock-gore has increased (thanks a lot, Terrifier), and the genre of spooky live-action movies for kids (a la Return to Oz, The Watcher in the Woods, Mom's Got a Date with a Vampire) has dwindled. The older I get, the more I become nostalgic for being spooked in that plugging-in-a-night-light-and-hiding-under-the-covers kind of way. Lucky for me, Bryan Fuller's Dust Bunny, which marks the cult TV creator's feature film debut, not only satisfies that nostalgia, but manages to feel like a warm hug and a therapy session all at the same time.

It's the perfect premise for a child-friendly horror film: a little girl hires a hitman to kill the monster under her bed. What makes it even more perfect is that the hitman in question is none other than Mads Mikkelsen, aka Hannibal Lecter himself. It works whether or not you're familiar with his work: tall, intimidating man with a serious mug and an even lower voice (all of which made for the perfect traits for his version of the iconic cannibal doctor in Fuller's short-lived but enormously beloved NBC series) sitting across the kitchen table from a doe-eyed, eight-year-old girl. The contrast is what keeps the film moving: tiny, exasperated Aurora, and utterly unconvinced Mads (who has no name in the film other than Resident 5B). Aurora, despite being our hero, is just as mysterious as the neighbor she tries to hire.

"Aurora's backstory is very limited because I wanted the audience to be able to bring their [own] backstory to it," Fuller tells GamesRadar+. "So when she says, 'My parents were very nice to me,' that's gonna mean something different to a lot of different people. We had a screening last night, and there was a young woman who came up to me and told me what it meant to her and how it was healing for her because her interpretation of Aurora's past was specific to her own past."

Is that enough to kill a monster?

I don't quite know how to explain it, but Dust Bunny is the kind of movie I would've loved as an eight-year-old girl. I can see it clear as day, playing on a VHS on one of those portable players they used to make for kids on long car trips. I can even hear myself asking my parents to rewind and play it again. From the fantastical, run-down Victorian apartment complex that Aurora and Mads live in, to the technicolor of the dim-sum restaurant, all the way to the remnants of blood that are left behind after the titular dust bunny comes out of the floor and eats its victims… it's a child's dream on steroids.

It's visually stunning, but also pretty painful. Aurora is alone in the world, and the only person she can connect with is just as alone, if not the loneliest (hit)man alive. The film is weirdly, deeply healing, and it knows this. At one point in the film, Sigourney Weaver, who appears to be Resident 5B's hitman boss, tells him verbatim that saving Aurora from the monster won't heal his inner child.

"I grew up in a very tricky home with a violent father, and so the monster wasn't under my bed. It was down the hall," Fuller says. "There's something about those scenarios where you can either buckle, or try to tell a story and hope that people find the story and see themselves in the story. If it were a fairy tale children's book, it would be something about the lessons that we learned to heal ourselves and to not take personal responsibility for the things that other people may have done to us."

It knows I'm wicked

At the center of Dust Bunny is that classic, and often devastating trope: a child knows something is wrong, and the adults don't believe them until it's far too late. We see it often in Stephen King stories, and sprinkled throughout early Steven Spielberg – who Fuller mentions gave him a few notes on the script. If you're familiar with early 80s Spielberg, you might notice a few themes: the quirky side characters a la David Dastmalchian's mustached villain (who has a laugh-out-loud moment that breaks up a particularly tense part of the film), and the strange relationship Aurora has with her monster, which feels like a reverse E.T.

"E.T served as a great metaphor and kind of a magic band-aid for these kids that also left them yearning," Fuller says. "And in some ways was so emotionally satisfying, yet incomplete in a way that – I still wonder what Elliot is doing today, and how the magic of that experience changed his life."

E.T. also famously has several adults who don't believe that an alien from outer space is living in their son's closet, and can we really blame them? The use of that trope in Dust Bunny made me sad for little Aurora, but the suspension of disbelief is crucial to the story – and what makes it truly stick the landing. I won't spoil anything for you, of course, but Fuller sums it up as such: "If there's a message in this movie, it's to believe children."

Dust Bunny is in theaters now. For more on what to watch, check out the rest of our Big Screen Spotlight series.