Horror movie fans can handle a lot. Nice people, the elderly, even sometimes children can be subjected to all manner of terror without alienating the audience. But there’s one line not even the most hardened Terrifier fanatic can handle. Animals are so sacrosanct, so off-limits, that complete websites have been created to protect viewers from seeing a furry friend come to a bad end.
So director Ben Leonberg and his producer Kari Fischer clearly enjoy living dangerously with their new movie Good Boy, a horror film told completely from the perspective of their dog Indy. “This is a horror movie, it’s definitely a horror movie. But for Indy, this is a love story,” Leonberg assures us upon entering the Den of Geek Studio at SXSW. “He loves his person. He would do anything to protect him and he’s detecting that something is wrong. And once he realizes that there is this malevolent force, he’s trying to protect his owner at any cost.”
Of course it helps with Indy’s performance that Leonberg and Fischer were on-set to stand in for the movie’s human stars, which include indie horror legend Larry Fessenden and essayist Arielle Friedman. After all, Leonberg and Fischer are a real-life couple, and Indy is their dog.
“I had had this idea for a horror movie told entirely from the perspective of a dog probably after watching Poltergeist, which begins with the Golden Retriever exploring the house and clearly aware that something’s going on before the humans are,” explains Leonberg. But it was the arrival of Indy that finally made the movie happen.
“We got Indy, started writing the script, and thinking we should test out this concept. One of those proof of concept shorts won him an acting award and that kind of forced our hand,” Leonberg laughs.
Not that Leonberg and Fischer didn’t realize they had a born movie star living with them. “Indy’s always had a really intense thousand-yard star,” Fischer says. “Ben likes to say it often happens before mealtime, but quite often even when he was just a little puppy, he would just sit there kind of expectantly staring at us and around corners. He’s always kind of given us a little bit of uncertainty.”
“Every dog or pet owner has wondered, ‘Why is my dog barking at nothing or staring at nothing?’” adds Leonberg. “It’s spooky, but that’s what humans bred dogs to do—to be our first line of defense against unseen predators. We allude to this in the movie that there are things that dogs can pick up on that even modern science can’t detect. There are bombs sniffing dogs that do a better job than any computer. There are things dogs are equipped to do that even we can’t fully understand or pick up on, even now.”
While the focus on Indy offers interesting storytelling possibilities, it also created challenges for the production. “Getting the camera down on his level was a practical challenge just because the lowest conventionally available tripods, high hats, are actually still too high,” admits Leonberg. “So we had to get creative with getting the camera on Indy’s level. For much of the movie, you would have characters off-camera just by the way they were normally framed.”
That focus on animal heights aligns Good Boy with another movie with Steven Spielberg connections, ET: The Extra-Terrestial. “It’s about the world of children in ET, and in Good Boy, it’s about the world of the dog. Not that he doesn’t have this like intimate relationship with the human, it’s just that we see Indy weaving through the humans’ legs and like interacting with their hands and feet. It’s almost like Indy becomes a silent film actor.”
Unlike actual silent actors, however, Indy is a dog and has different motivations. “The dog does not know he’s in a movie and he never will know he’s in a movie,” Leonberg says. “So working with an actor who doesn’t agree on the reality of the premise that we’re making a film together is definitely challenging.”
He continues, “But there are huge advantages to that. We had to build the production, which is both a limitation and an asset. We built the production around Indy’s schedule, around the things he already naturally does. There’s things that he does in the movie that you can’t really train a dog to do, or at least I don’t know how to train a dog to do. You can’t train a dog to fall asleep on command. You just have to know the dog’s everyday routine and schedule, and be ready with cameras rolling when he falls asleep and wakes up. But through careful editing and shot selection and the mix of objective and subjective shots, it all feels like it’s still from his subjectivity.”
That challenge also allows Leonberg and Fischer to create a more relatable horror movie because it draws the audience in. “If you film that and then film an empty corner, the audience’s imagination fills in the blanks and you create the meaning cinematically,” observes Leonberg.
“I think horror works best when it’s relatable,” Leonberg continues. “I love Lassie, I love Air Bud, but it doesn’t feel real, and that’s part of the appeal of those films. But with Good Boy, making it real and relatable helps people recognize these quiet, personal, domestic moments with the dog. He’s not guided by abstract thought or things that a dog couldn’t realistically do—esides the obvious caveat of the supernatural.”
Then again, as much as Leonberg and Fischer insist that Indy’s an every day dog, he was bred for stardom.
“We named the dog Indiana,” laughs Fischer, quoting Sean Connery in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
Maybe Good Boy isn’t just a movie that doesn’t put the dog in danger. Maybe Good Boy is the movie that allows Indy to be the star he was always to be.
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