Good Boy is in theaters today, and as part of io9’s chat with Ben Leonberg—its director and co-writer, as well as the owner of the film’s canine star, Indy—we asked him about the biggest question animal lovers have when approaching any film featuring an adorable pup: does the dog die? (If you’re a horror fan, you know the odds historically aren’t great.)
We also asked Leonberg about the film’s supernatural frights, and some thematic hints dropped by the vintage horror movies that pop up along the way.
Obviously, if you haven’t seen Good Boy yet, beware of spoilers to follow.
“Horror movies, I think in particular, have trained audiences to expect that dogs frequently don’t make it out of act one,” Leonberg said. “The concept we’re playing on is how there’s that dog in a horror movie who won’t go into the basement, or he’s always staring into empty corners or suspicious of the creepy neighbor. That dog usually doesn’t make it out of the first 30 minutes because he foresees the evil, and the evil forces take him out.”
Good Boy, of course, is different. Indy is the star. He fills the Final Girl role—to call upon a different horror trope—and he does indeed make it to the end.
“We’re obviously telling a story entirely from the dog’s perspective. So the dog is there for the whole film, but I think that’s part of the reason people are so invested in his story,” Leonberg said. “And I’ll say, I think the reason the movie has done so well in the festival circuit and people are excited to see it is Indy and his performance. So we’re excited for people to go [see it in theaters] and have that same experience that early festival audiences have had. I’m thrilled it is engendering the reaction it’s getting.”
Indy survives. But Todd, his owner, played by Shane Jensen (with some key stand-in work by Leonberg), does not. The reason Todd moves to the country—to the old family home where his grandfather passed away some years prior—is to hopefully recover from an unspecified illness.
But the viewer can soon tell that Todd is much sicker than he’s admitted to his worried sister, who checks in by phone so often he snaps at her to leave him alone. And it becomes apparent as Good Boy progresses that the “monster” haunting the home may actually be death itself, circling closer. Todd doesn’t notice—he can’t perceive its presence; he’s either too sick or too human, or both—but a confused and alarmed Indy becomes hyper-aware of it.
“That’s a totally fair reading,” Leonberg said when we asked him about what the creature represents. “I guess what I’ll say is that we wanted, as I mentioned before, [to have] the dog’s point of view as the center of the storytelling and the story itself. So we asked ourselves—a Grim Reaper figure, a cloak and a skeleton and a dark scythe, that’s a metaphor that makes sense to humans, but doesn’t necessarily mean anything to a dog.”
He described a bit more about how the creature’s appearance—it’s a shadowy, oily, menacing entity—came to be. “Some of what you see in terms of the paranormal and this figure that’s getting closer and closer, we wanted to put it in a context that would make more sense to how a dog might see a specter of death,” he said. “We obviously can’t know and understand that because we can’t ask them. But that was kind of our artistic prompt for, what is this all going to look like?”
As he’s ailing, Todd spends a lot of time watching movies on his grandfather’s old black-and-white TV. Horror fans will pick out Mutant and Carnival of Souls among the titles. They’re both thematically tuned-in choices; Mutant is about a spreading sickness, and Carnival of Souls offers a big hint that Todd’s house is almost a zone of purgatory between life and death.
“Well done, yeah,” Leonberg agreed. “Both are creatively and practically relevant to the story. Carnival of Souls, for exactly the reason you mentioned, is one of the origins of the trope of dead but unaware. Obviously, most famously, The Sixth Sense runs with that. There’s an element of that that is at hand when that film appears in our film. And the music of Carnival of Souls is so wonderful that it makes a really nice lyrical bridge between two kinds of chapters of the ending of the film.”
He continued. “And then Mutant has some resonance with the storytelling, but also sets up a very specific scare because of what you see reflected on the TV versus what happens with Indy. So there are a lot of fun parallels, and we were very specific in choosing all of that.”
Good Boy is in theaters now.