Dust Bunny, the new fantasy-horror film from writer-director Bryan Fuller, has a deceptively simple logline: Mads Mikkelsen must help kill the monster under a little girl’s bed. It’s a storybook-like premise rooted in early childhood fears, but Fuller approaches it with an adult gravitas that complements its innate sense of childlike wonder. Using the universality of the concept as a driving force, Dust Bunny wields adolescent anxieties and affords them a sharpened, grown-up edge, folding in real violence and dramatic weight as Mikkelsen’s nameless hitman leaves his John Wick-like world of clandestine assassins to help a girl with a problem far stranger than men with guns. It’s a cross-generational genre film that feels oddly novel in a year more likely to offer its young film audiences something like Five Nights At Freddy’s 2—it’s a true gateway horror movie in a media landscape where those gates have moved elsewhere. Where kids once were ushered into the chilling and unknown through the curation of studios and filmmakers unleashing such projects into theaters, they are now gaining this experience from the unbridled abundance of content available in video games, online videos, and forums. Though it can capitalize on IP, Hollywood hasn’t figured out how to keep up.
The youthful genre blend of Dust Bunny used to be a reliable route for studios and filmmakers to cultivate new legions of genre fans. From the 1970s through the 2000s—a lengthy interval during which the intensity of relatively edgy (and broadly marketed) PG films like Gremlins and Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom helped usher in the PG-13 rating, further expanding audience accessibility for films with frightening elements—approachable movies with adult themes regularly served as launching pads for generations of kids developing their first taste for horror. Today, that kind of gateway material often comes from elsewhere.
Hollywood rarely makes genre films that deliberately reach out to young viewers, and the days of Jaws and Poltergeist, of Hocus Pocus and The Mummy, even of Coraline and ParaNorman, have waned. Young people seeking psyche-shaking thrills have long been turning instead to creepypasta forums, spooky online video content, and jumpscare-forward games. For years, film studios acted as the chaperones that allowed filmmakers to mentor horror-curious kids. That function has now transferred to YouTube, Twitch, and Steam.
Dust Bunny is a welcome throwback to the kind of supernatural fantasy-horror fare custom-built for movie theaters that once bridged the distant worlds of childhood and adulthood. But it shares its release month with a film that is its pointed opposite—one that gained its foothold with kids in explicitly modern terms. Five Nights At Freddy’s 2 is the latest entry in a franchise that has become a blueprint for how younger generations discover and engage with horror. The same whispers that once made a film like The Gate feel like a forbidden revelation are now reserved for game-based fare like FNAF.
Where kids would once push past their comfort zone by delving into the scariest cover art at the video store, that sense of danger now lives in daring each other to embrace the Five Nights At Freddy’s games’ simple, nerve-shredding premise: As an overnight security guard at a rundown pizza-and-arcade restaurant, the player sits stationary, monitoring security cameras as the chain’s animatronic mascots begin to encroach, visible only on the flickering displays. That tense, easily accessible setup launched FNAF into the stratosphere, with spin-off games, clothing lines, plush toys, Halloween costumes, and now a live-action theatrical series. The first film’s success—it’s Blumhouse’s highest-grossing movie ever—proved just how deeply the series’ popularity had taken hold among its target demographic.
And this isn’t a cranky complaint about how kids get their horror fix today. Their pivot to other media is only natural; Hollywood has failed them, so of course they’d look elsewhere. The industry seems uninterested in reaching out to young people with new ideas designed for them, barely keeping pace with their franchise adaptations.
This is just another part of the dismal machinery of Hollywood intellectual property exploitation, larger releases favoring established, box-office-friendly juggernauts. Even the MPA has shown its hand: Five Nights arrives with a PG-13 rating “for violent content, terror, and some language,” positioning it for a box-office windfall without the stigma of an adults-only label. Dust Bunny, on the other hand, is inexplicably rated R for “some violence.” This discrepancy conveys the message that Five Nights—a lazy, on-rails brand extension—deserves a young audience. Meanwhile, that younger crowd immediately faces a roadblock around the original, genuinely imaginative and fantastical Dust Bunny.
None of this is the fault of the target audience. If anything, the success of the FNAF movies proves that they are, to some degree, still interested in seeing horror stories on the big screen, just as adults are. Horror has been a major boon to the 2025 box office, it’s just that none of this year’s hits have been tailored for younger viewers. The majority of horror titles released in 2025 have been rated R, and the scant few that aren’t are primarily sourced from existing IP that kids would have a debatable amount of knowledge or interest in.
M3GAN 2.0 could perk some kids’ heads up, but it also takes a sci-fi-action route that many kids have already been exposed to, in some form, through comic book films. The same goes for Predator: Badlands, which softens the scarier aspects of an older franchise into a buddy action movie. The upcoming Anaconda is PG-13, but it’s also a comedy riffing on a 30-year-old B-movie. One of the year’s few true horror films with a youth-friendly rating is The Woman In The Yard, and that disposable Blumhouse ghost movie had a depressing tone and morose themes (it was, naturally, about trauma). Dust Bunny is the one original genre release that features some grown-up elements but actively works to temper those more mature inclinations, which could generate true generational crossover appeal. Nonetheless, it has been railroaded into being a movie for adults.
Meanwhile, the actual rites of passage into horror that kids will inevitably find now arrive through their computer and phone screens. If they’re not actively playing Five Nights, they’re watching it through Let’s Plays, courtesy of creators who specialize in game commentary. Many young people who were fans during the initial FNAF boom have grown up to move on to new horizons in the horror space, from other viral games like Poppy Playtime to bizarre YouTube series like The Walten Files. They continue to explore online, indelibly marked by how sifting through these digital-age urban legends feels at once boundless and isolating.
Some filmmakers have suffused their own cult hits with this tone. Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink runs on an experimental, experiential wavelength that mirrors the creepy modern myths traded on horror forums. Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going To The World’s Fair (and, to a subtler degree, their follow-up I Saw The TV Glow) evokes the unmoored dissociation that accompanies primarily experiencing life through a screen. Daniel Goldhaber’s Cam builds its tension from that same disorienting sense of digital disconnect.
These films differ from the more conventional “screenlife” horrors that simply adapt familiar frameworks for an online age. Titles like the Unfriended franchise, Rob Savage’s Zoom-based Host, or Joseph and Vanessa Winter’s streamer horror-comedy Deadstream are essentially tech updates to longstanding traditions of found-footage and supernatural horror. The newer wave of internet-based horror, by contrast, is concerned with the unsettling, detached sensation of losing yourself in the endless sprawl of digital spaces—an experience that has become nearly universal among younger generations. And while this might feel exclusively contemporary, it has clear antecedents: Kiyoshi Kurosawa‘s somber ghost story Pulse captured this disturbing mood with uncanny precision back in 2001.
The thing is, those movies aren’t aimed at kids, even if they’re the only ones actually reflecting the reality of where young people learn the language of horror. World’s Fair is in direct dialogue with the experience of growing up online, but it’s an indie movie not explicitly aimed at adventurous kids. Meanwhile, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 bears no such insight; it’s simply an opportunity for a studio to cash in on a property that built its audience outside of film. Put Josh Hutcherson in a building filled with familiar iconography, and you’ve got a movie that speaks directly enough to its built-in fanbase to make a windfall. Even those raised on contemporary modes of horror aren’t immune to studio executives looking to bleed a franchise dry.
For young film audiences, it’s a sad state of affairs in every direction. Dust Bunny speaks to kids in a bracingly inspired language, but is hamstrung by an industry that treats originality as a liability. Five Nights is recognizable and has been marketed to death, but it’s an IP cash-in that trades on brand familiarity alone. A new wave of indie horror films that communicate through an unconventional, internet-haunted aesthetic are evocative and authentic, but must be discovered sideways in an increasingly flooded media landscape. These three approaches form a kind of negative map around what kids aren’t getting: sincere, challenging horror that trusts them with real ideas and emotions. Unless Hollywood is willing to meet them there, kids will continue building their own rites of passage elsewhere.