Good Boy is a horror movie unlike any other. We’ve seen haunted house movies, but instead of focusing on screaming teens or fearless ghost investigators, it’s told from the perspective of a dog. (A Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever, to be precise.) In Good Boy, Indy the pup must protect his owner as supernatural forces close in on their remote cabin.
Originally slated for a limited release, this swift, 90-minute thriller got a wide release after its trailer went viral, with people flocking to Google to find out if Indy survives. We won’t spoil the ending here, but if you’re curious where the idea for Good Boy came from in the first place, we’ve got you covered.
First-time director Ben Leonberg, who’s also the real-life owner of Indy, says he wanted to create this movie to tap into the fears that every dog owner shares.
“I think it comes from a thought or maybe worry every dog owner has had, which is, ‘Why is my dog barking at nothing or staring at nothing?’” Leonberg tells Polygon. “There’s probably a perfectly valid reason for that, but the human imagination can’t help but think the worst, think ghosts. I wanted to play on that anxiety. Then, in the screenwriting and filming process, it was figuring out how to tell a story that really locks into that perspective, where we’re limited to everything the dog can even understand as a way to have this narrative unfold.”
Good Boy is experimental in the best way, hooking audiences immediately with a protagonist you help but to care for and root for, does well with exposition, and utilizes offhand dialogue from other characters, especially since our protagonist can’t talk.
Leonberg insists that his dog isn’t giving a performance, but rather it’s the artistry of the film that gives life to each scene. Indy is one of the most innocent protagonists in film history, and that’s not lost on its director.
“I think Indy, probably all dogs, all animals, are kind of a cheat code for pulling on an audience’s heartstrings because they are innocent,” Leonberg says. “They don’t know they’re in the movie. And there’s a really interesting lesson just about performance, that he’s not performing. I can’t say that enough, he does not know he was in a movie, but through filmmaking, the sound design, the music, the shots, the lighting, you can kind of convey an emotion and a feeling on his — what are otherwise neutral expressions — and the audience will project a performance onto him. I think that genuinely is how most of the movie works: the filmmaking is telling the audience how to feel, and then they’re putting that emotion on. He’s listening to us just make silly noises on set. And the audience says, Wow, I’m scared. So the dog must be scared. He’s not. He’s just trying to figure out what his mom and dad are doing.”
Even down to the breed of dog, everything was taken into consideration to fuel audience reactions.
“I think we relate to a dog like Indy,” Leonberg says, gesturing to the pet sitting behind him. “He’s not very big, he’s only 19 inches high. The camera lives 19 inches off the ground, which was challenging in filmmaking. But I don’t know if you would want a big Cujo St Bernard; that would be such a formidable opponent for the supernatural.”
Indy is a bit small when it comes to beasts that might fight the supernatural.
“How could he possibly succeed? That’s really good for a story,” Leonberg says. “Also stinking cute.”
Good Boy is in theaters now.