You’ll have to wait until December to discover just how adorable the man-eating monster is in writer/director Bryan Fuller’s Dust Bunny, but the filmmaker’s breakdown of its conception gives a strong indication of the cuteness ahead.
The whimsical gateway horror film, releasing in theaters on December 5 via Lionsgate and Roadside Attractions, follows 10-year-old Aurora (Sophie Sloan) as she enlists her mysterious neighbor (Mads Mikkelsen) to aid her in getting rid of the monster she claims ate her parents.
While Aurora’s neighbor specializes in real-life monsters, it’s safe to say that Aurora isn’t lying about a rather scruffy but vicious beast lurking under her bed. Though glimpses of this delightfully ferocious bedtime monster likely won’t arrive until closer to release, Bloody Disgusting spoke with Fuller about his Dust Bunny after the film’s TIFF premiere about its conception and creation.
Fuller reveals that his monster, which occasionally moves in an almost stop-motion-like manner, is a mix of practical and VFX.
“It’s partial, a big puppet,” he tells us. “There’s a massive puppet that we had that was built by Legacy. They did sort of a ‘friends and family’ because it was like, ‘We have no money, you can cut this out.’ And they were like, ‘We’ll take care of you.’ The other part was our fantastic visual effects supervisor, who had a visual effects house that did the full body. When you see close-ups that are just of the hands or the head, there are a lot of shots that are of the puppet.
“But it all started when I reached out to a fantastic comic book artist named Jon Wayshak, whom I had worked with on the Pushing Daisies comic 15-16 years ago. I always loved his style, so I reached out to him and said, ‘I want to design a monster.’ I was like, ‘It’s part Highland cow.’ Because I love Highland cows, oh my God, they’re so cute. It’s part Highland cow, part piranha, and a little bit of a hippopotamus, and it’s massive. Then he sent the sketch, and I was like, “That’s great, thank you.” When Legacy built it, they made a couple of small tweaks, but it is very much with the underbite and very much Jon Wayshak’s design.”
Stay tuned for more about Dust Bunny closer to the film’s release this December.
In case you missed it: watch the Dust Bunny trailer now.
