Horror as a genre is a lot like comedy: if you have a strong enough premise, you can get away with murder. What surprises me is that we don’t see a lot more modern horror movies going all in on a premise with stylish abandon. There are an infinite number of narrative playsets and gimmicks you can construct in the horror genre that sell an audience on a big idea, and is likely something they haven’t really seen before.
Case in point: I am chomping at the bit to see Good Boy, an original horror film due this October. Why am I so excited for this movie? Because it’s told from the perspective of a dog.
This Ain’t Homeward Bound
Pet perspectives are nothing new to the cinematic palette. Even the horror genre has experienced some great gems in this vein like the must-read novel Thor by Wayne Smith. That got turned into the enjoyable Bad Moon but lost the hook of the story: telling it through a dog’s eyes.
That’s the whole mission statement for Good Boy, the feature film debut of director and co-writer Ben Leonberg. Leonberg uses his own dog, Indy, to tell a haunted house story where a loyal pup is trying to warn his master about the malevolent forces only Indy can perceive.
Leonberg purposefully shot a lot of Good Boy at the eye level that would be appropriate for a dog. This isn’t going for some Disney fluff or anything of that nature. Good Boy is a horror movie through and through, and that sounds exactly like the kind of thing I want to see coming out of the genre these days.
Make More Weird Ideas
Good Boy doesn’t sound like the oddest idea ever for a horror movie, but then you stop and think, “Why hasn’t anyone done this before?” Again, there have been offbeat examples in the genre before. For instance, there is the 1989 dark gem Baxter, an adaptation of the novel Hell Hound by Ken Greenhall. That movie gives the lead dog an interior monologue thanks to the book doing so, but Good Boy isn’t leaning on such an easy out for its lead character.
Indy won’t have any voiceover to tell us his thoughts. Instead, Leonberg was able to get a legitimate performance out of his dog without having to use either narration or CG animation. Everything Indy does in the movie was actually captured on camera. That alone makes it feel special in today’s animation inundation in genre fare.
I love that Good Boy is a movie sold on such a strong concept. That makes it a touch weird, and weird is very good at getting my attention. Add to all this that audiences love dogs so much in movies that killing one can turn viewers against your movie! Now they are going to follow one around for a whole movie while he escapes paranormal peril? That sounds like a recipe for success.
Good Boy is getting a limited release this October and is planned to stream on Shudder sometime after.
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