“I definitely now understand why they say don’t work with children or animals”, laughs writer/director Ben Leonberg, whose breakout horror hit Good Boy stars his beloved pooch Indy as the pet whose owner has just moved him to a haunted house. “And that’s before you consider the production schedule – I always knew he could only work a few hours a day, so our shoots would be very short nights spread out over 400 days, but even that was subject to change.”
Told from the dog’s perspective, Good Boy is the story of a faithful hound who wants to protect his owner from the supernatural occurrences he’s spotting all over their rural cabin in the woods. Several of owner Todd’s family members have died there previously, but Indy is still the first character to be aware of what’s going on around him.
The idea for the film initially came after Leonberg revisited Poltergeist, which includes the famous brief sequence where the family dog recognises the haunting before his owners do. It’s the best example of that famous horror trope, but the director thought nobody had taken advantage of its full potential.
“I’ve always thought someone should tell a story like this from a dog’s point of view, but it took a long time to figure out how to do that in a script; dialogue is the engine that powers most films, and this film wouldn’t rely on it if we were to do it right. That scene in Poltergeist was the inception of the idea, and the film was absolutely a huge influence – plus, my dog is named Indy, so it’s probably not hard to tell which director I’m most inspired by!”
However, with a non-professional actor in the lead, the script was a blueprint that could never be followed to the letter. The process of shooting the movie from Indy’s vantage point meant that several sequences had to be completely redesigned when it was time to film, with Leonberg constantly readapting the screenplay – co-written with Alex Cannon - to account for each hurdle.
“There was always a limited point of view because we were trying to have a realistic canine protagonist – the most important dialogue scenes where you hear exposition about the haunted history don’t happen here, because Indy doesn’t speak English and he’ll just wander away to investigate a smell! Limiting the audience’s perspective was always going to be part of it, and we tried to make that an asset as much as possible.
“Practically, it was a bigger challenge than we initially anticipated. Indy is a small dog, his eye line is only 19 inches off the ground, and the first problem we needed to solve was getting a tripod low enough that was right for a dog – from that moment, we were constantly reworking things.
“Indy can only be method, he doesn’t know how to act as anybody but himself, so there were lots of little moments throughout where he’d do things that we’d never trained him to do, which we ended up incorporating – they're now some of my favourite moments in the movie. We’d film him looking towards the camera, for example, with the aim of editing that with a POV shot showing something spooky, and then he’d just step back or tilt his head in a way that when edited together, would make it look like he was really afraid in that scene.
“These little gestures would bring those moments to life in ways that felt real and were only possible because we were able to take our time and spend years capturing all this footage.”
Although actor Shane Jensen voices Indy’s owner Todd, Leonberg appears as his body double throughout, his face never shown onscreen as Indy can’t look up high enough to see it. If you think Indy gives one of the best canine performances ever, it’s because he’s just that comfortable with his owner.
“The filmmaking gives the illusion that Indy is giving a performance, and because he’s my dog, we were able to capture real things from our life to incorporate into the story; the way he waves between my legs as a sign of affection, or how I give him scratches on his side. We lived in the house the story takes place in at the time, so to Indy it was just another day – the love and affection you see that he has for his owner in the movie is real, because he’s my dog, and he’s spending that time with me.
“My co-writer and I were trying to find the right balance of drama and the escalating dread with the love and affection between those two characters. And that’s where having a dog as a main character becomes the biggest advantage, as that central relationship makes intuitive sense to the audience right off the bat.”
Although the film has become a viral sensation before release, it’s still uncertain whether Good Boy will be a hit, as pet owners and lovers everywhere have made it clear they will only watch if Indy makes it out okay. It’s not an impulse Leonberg fully understands, although as a dog owner, he does empathise a little.
“I’m very aware of how well horror movies have trained audiences to be worried, because in a lot of those films, the dog who is suspicious of the evil presence before anybody else doesn’t make it out of the first act. They’ve been trained by the genre to worry about Indy and assume the worst thing that could possibly happen will happen to him - what I would say is that this film is different in that he’s the hero of this story and that we’re experiencing this from his perspective.”
After taking several years to complete Good Boy, Leonberg is currently planning his next film, which he teases will similarly be told from a unique perspective.
“I want to make more films which use new points of view as part of the storytelling, finding perspectives like in this film, where the camera is always 19 inches off the ground. A lot of my ideas are about using that physical presence of perspective as a way to power the storytelling.
“As for the scale of the films? Well, Stephen King had a great quote I’ll paraphrase, where he said that there’s a direct correlation between how expensive a horror movie looks, how famous the cast is, with how scary it is – the bigger and more famous, the less scary it is, because horror movies work best when they’re relatable, and look and feel like our real world.
“We tried so hard to get a genuine performance out of Indy for that reason, so you’d feel like he was a dog you’ve met before. Whatever I make next, I want to keep that aesthetic – the stories I want to tell have to feel tangible to what we experience in our own lives.”
Good Boy is released in UK cinemas on Friday, 10th October.
