Most dog owners can recall at least one instance where their pup has reacted to a seemingly invisible presence. Are they picking up a sound pitched higher than our hearing? Sniffing out the memory of a dropped piece of food? Or perhaps… using their canine super-senses to detect something supernatural?
Good Boy, the feature debut of director and co-writer Ben Leonberg, takes that idea and runs with it, following Indy (played by Leonberg’s own dog) and his owner, Todd (Shane Jensen), as they move into the former home of Todd’s late grandfather. It’s a gloomy, dark, isolated place, and—as Indy soon realizes—it appears to be teeming with unquiet spirits.
Ahead of Good Boy‘s release next week, io9 got a chance to talk to Leonberg, with a quick hello from Indy too.
It Began With ‘Poltergeist’
Cheryl Eddy, io9: I’m curious about the initial idea for Good Boy. Did you know you wanted to do a horror movie as your first feature? When did the idea of centering it on Indy become a part of it?
Ben Leonberg: It’s probably not hard to predict, if I have a dog named Indy, that some of my favorite films are, broadly speaking, genre [films]. Horror is just something—because I’m such a fan of the craft of filmmaking, at least the kind that I’m really excited about—I think about all the time. So I’m not surprised I made a horror movie first.
And in terms of the idea of where it came from, to crystallize a moment I can remember, I was watching Poltergeist probably for the millionth time, and if you remember, that film starts with the Golden Retriever wandering around the house, clearly clued in that something haunting is going on before the humans have realized it. I thought, “Someone should make a story entirely from that dog’s point of view.” And it took a long time to figure out how to actually tell that story, but the result was Good Boy.
io9: The haunted house is a classic horror setting—in Poltergeist, obviously, but many others too—and Good Boy really leans into those elements. The door’s creaking; the power goes out. How did you approach making those tropes feel fresh by filming them from the dog’s point of view?
Leonberg: I think the point of view of the dog was the challenge and the solution. Just by virtue of, sometimes, what it would actually take to put the camera in a dog’s point of view for this scene that feels familiar because it’s been played out in many horror films before. Filming it from a dog’s point of view made it feel fresh because the camera is in a place no one’s ever seen this take place from before.
I think a lot of the scenes work because most horror films are following human characters. So take a scene where the person walks into a room and [says], “That’s weird—the dog is staring at an empty corner.” In our film, we’re seeing the moment before the human walks in. We’re seeing that dog follow this invisible thing and get to this place. So it’s almost like the film is a behind-the-scenes look at a setting or a circumstance that audiences kind of intuitively already understand but have never seen play out just this way.
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