How do you go about making a horror movie starring a dog? First, come up with a great name—how about “Good Boy?” Second, dress the stage to match the audience’s expectations of what a horror movie should look like. Third, drop the camera down about one metre, to the height of a dog’s eyes. And you have a horror movie starring a dog.
“Good Boy” (Shudder), showing now at the Montrose Playhouse, doesn’t outstay its welcome. Frugal with crew (short closing credits), frugal with length (under seventy-five minutes), frugal with budget (only $750,000 according to the entry on Wikipedia), frugal with its human cast (four). Dog-star Indy sniffs, howls, whines, pouts, and, most commonly, stares. Indy belongs to a man who has untreatable lung disease. In a sharp exchange with his oncologist about enrolment into a clinical trial, the man asks, incredulously, “You’re rejecting me because I’m too sick? Why are you rejecting someone who wants to become a guinea pig?” “I’m sorry,” his doctor replies. “It just doesn’t work like that.” It happens that the man inherited a big house in the woods from his grandfather. He settles in for a few days, watches old black-and-white horror films on home-recorded V.H.S. tapes, and chats a little to his dog. From this jumping-off point, a horror-movie backdrop is carefully created: isolated house, creepy woods, haunted graveyard, drips of blood, un-hummable music, heavy rain, gloomy staircase leading to pitch-black basement, kooky neighbour warning of wild-animal traps, mostly nighttime sequences.
The idea is deceptively simple. But in order to turn what is a very thin story into a film many alternatives need to be weighed and a balance struck between providing clues for our inquisitive minds and risking the film becoming just a touch too clever. It is subtle; if the detail-orientation and focus of the filmmakers is grasped early on, it becomes straightforward to draw a conclusion about their (at times) profound contribution to the horror genre. For instance, given that it is the dog who is the star, we are not shown the man’s face clearly until the very end. We learn about him because of rambling and repetitive conversations with his sister over the loudspeaker of his mobile phone. The dog’s ears may hear; but it is our brains that assemble. The dog sees the man’s legs rather than his torso as he painfully gets out of bed; his boots hit the floor unexpectedly loudly as he shucks them off; and most important of all the story is not told in one continuous arc—it is reorganised in the audience’s brain by the dog’s witness to, say, vomiting, hospital visits, or excessive sleeping. We can deduce from the evidence that the man’s health has recently changed for the worse, but the filmmakers give it to us in fragments, like shards of glass. “Good Boy” is dialog-light by design—with little or no backstory and no context to the information we are fed along the way.
I wrote that “right-on-cue screams are expected by the cinema audience” as part of my July review of one of this year’s strongest horror films, “I Know What You Did Last Summer.” But dogs don’t scream. So a sound designer has to become very creative, and that’s exactly what Kelly Oostman has been. The parcels of sound are first layered and then compressed and overlapped to become part traditional horror-movie soundscape, part canine, part just odd. The strange classical music (atonal, dissonant, frequently interrupted, quarter- and half-tones, the near-absence of chords of any kind) is omnipresent, but with, say, a triplet drum beat added to the base to resemble the rhythmic striking of an anvil. It really works. And the rainfall is experienced both as a torrent, hammering against window or roof, and as the distinctive “plop” of an individual heavy drop of water hitting the base of an empty bucket, drawing our minds back to the man’s blood dripping fatefully from his nose.
Tremendous kudos to Ben Leonberg for his intelligent debut feature film. (He also served as the film’s editor and cinematographer.) There is a perfect shot towards the end where the dog is sitting on an upturned dog house (perhaps a nod to Snoopy in “The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show” (1983-1985)). The previous sequences have all been shot in darkness, black-and-white, or in the film’s signature blue-black hue; often with lights flickering—in-out-on-off—just like the music. But now the dog appears in full colour, lit by a conveniently placed motion-detector spotlight on the outside of the main house. And watch out for the beautifully lit tree during the same short scene.
In one of their phone calls, the man recounts his man-with-dog weekend to his sister. “Sounds kinda creepy,” his sister suggests, joining the dots. “I guess living in a haunted house kinda takes your mind off it.”
Adam Poole
24th October 2025
If you are interested in viewing this screening, please book your tickets here
