Aurora (Sophie Sloan, far left) gets some tea with her hitman neighbor (Mads Mikkelsen) and the mysterious Laverne (Sigourney Weaver) in the family horror movie "Dust Bunny."
Director Bryan Fuller and Sigourney Weaver attend the world premiere of "Dust Bunny" during Toronto Film Festival.
Aurora (Sophie Sloan) thinks the monster under her bed ate her family in the family horror adventure "Dust Bunny."

Confess to Sigourney Weaver that you first saw “Alien” at the age of 7, and she offers the best response.

“You’re welcome,” the sci-fi icon says with a smile. “I have met smaller children, which astonishes me. I look at the parent: “ ‘Have you seen it? And now you're sending this baby?’ It's amazing to me.”

Weaver was a pop-culture stalwart in the late 1970s and early ‘80s when the “Alien” films, her gem “Ghostbusters” and other kid-curious scary movies like “Gremlins” sent a generation scrambling to their parents to beg to see them – or, if they were R-rated, to sneak a peek by any means necessary.

The actress’ newest project is of a similar ilk. Director Bryan Fuller’s family horror adventure “Dust Bunny” (in theaters Dec. 12) centers on a 10-year-old girl named Aurora (Sophie Sloan) with a monster under her bed that she believes ate her foster parents. Her neighbor (Mads Mikkelsen) is a hitman, so she hires him to take out the ginormous problem in her room.

The situation gets more complex with the addition of a bunch of oddball assassins trying to murder the neighbor, plus other mysterious and shady types like his former associate Laverne (Weaver).

Back in the day, Weaver starred in movies that blew children’s minds, and now watching “Dust Bunny,” “I feel like that kid and I want to have that experience. I want to believe in these things,” she says. “This was such an ambitious, original enchanting story about a girl who is in bad trouble. And she somehow empowers herself and keeps taking the next step to get what she needs.”

“Dust Bunny” marks the first film as a director for Fuller, who created TV's “Pushing Daisies” and “Hannibal.” He had '80s classics in mind making his movie – when editing “Dust Bunny," Fuller made it the exact same runtime as “Gremlins.” And even though it's rated R (for “some violence”), youngsters and their parents are still his primary audience.

“I love all of those films that (spawned) the PG-13 rating because they were too traumatic as PG movies,” says Fuller, who's nominated for best first feature for "Dust Bunny" at the Independent Spirit Awards in February. “Traumatizing kids with fiction is a great way to prepare them for real traumas and give them some coping mechanisms to handle those things when they come their way unexpectedly.

“This movie is for traumatized kids and for adults who have traumatized kids in their hearts.”

Fuller first developed “Dust Bunny” to be an episode for “Amazing Stories,” Steven Spielberg’s relaunch of his ‘80s anthology series for Apple TV in 2020. Fuller recalls “sitting at his boardroom table with the sled Rosebud from ‘Citizen Kane’ and massive models of his yacht” while figuring out who the central little girl is.

“Every character is a Horcrux that you chip off a bit of your soul and you put that in as your barometer, how they would react in situations and also your rationalizations of some of their more extreme actions,” Fuller says. And while turning it into a film, Fuller began to put his own experience and fears as a child into the narrative: “Writing Aurora did help little me and putting people in her life that I wish I'd had.”

Fuller hopes “Dust Bunny” is “a conversation starter for people to help kids move through their lives that may be challenging in their own way, but also help heal their inner child,” he says. “We never lose that stuff. It's always present with us.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'Dust Bunny' is an '80s throwback for 'traumatized kids'

Reporting by Brian Truitt, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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