“Good Boy”: When your dog stars in a horror movie, take cues from “The Shining”

Has your dog or cat ever stared intently into the corner . . . at nothing?

That’s the crux of horror flick “Good Boy,” in which Indy the retriever detects a baleful force that his human can’t see. With a magnetic presence on par with scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis‘ and soulful eyes rivaling Anya Taylor-Joy‘s, Indy infuses the supernatural thriller with an emotional resonance that will make viewers sit up.

In the film, city dog Indy accompanies best friend Todd (Shane Jensen) to the country where they hole up a creepy house that once belonged to Todd’s now-deceased grandfather (Larry Fessenden). While a host of intriguing news smells ranging from fallen logs and hidden foxes delight Indy’s nose, he also senses something strange and malevolent in the house that threatens to take over Todd. Dark and disturbing, “Good Boy” explores what happens when our pets are confronted with forces beyond their comprehension, and how we as humans often fail to heed our pet’s instincts.

Salon spoke with Indy’s humans, co-writer and director Ben Leonberg and producer Kari Fischer, about crafting their pet’s feature-length debut.

“He doesn’t know he was in a movie,” said Leonberg, clasping a happily wriggling Indy, who doesn’t register me on the other end of the Zoom interview. “He doesn’t know what acting is, but he knows that the camera being out means he’s supposed to do something. So he would take that as a cue that we’re about to do something: ‘I might be getting a treat in a little bit. Let’s figure this out.'”

Told entirely from Indy’s perspective, every frame of “Good Boy” either features Indy or a dog’s eye view of the action – with only a few calculated exceptions. This storytelling device is essential for viewers to understand the deadly, urgent nature of the threat.

“I started filming trying to explore how you would do the really classical haunted house [style] – shot, reverse shot – but with a dog as a character,” explained Leonberg. “I first started out recreating scenes from existing films – imagine Danny exploring the Overlook Hotel from ‘The Shining’ just going down the halls – and once we had that, a door just opened. I tried to recreate that with Indy in our apartment. We didn’t even have a full script at this point, but I learned how to get the camera on his eyeline, and also how to direct him, to use those that point of view and subjectivity as a way to progress the story.”

Who’s a good-looking boy?

Despite the film’s eerie setting filled with slanting shadows, splattered blood and furtive movements darting just out of frame, Indy provides a visual oasis – thanks to a warm golden coat accented with white markings. Leonberg utilized two lighting skills to plays capturing both Indy’s natural beauty and his expressions, which convey his growing feelings of dread.

“One, I was always trying to backlight him,” he said. “I once was given advice that if you have an actor or a subject that has great hair, just apply backlight and you’re going to make them look their best. And if your dog is made of great hair, it’s really easy. So [add] a top backlight and he just looks amazing.

“And then the other was, since point of view is such part of the storytelling, keeping his eyes alive,” he continued. “It’s called a ping or an eye catch, it’s that little dot the reflection of a light in their eye. . . . It was just a small little off-camera LED light, and it created a reflection and just brings you into his point of view in a way that is really helpful.”

Fischer added, “It helps you with eyeline too, so you could see where he was looking.”

Not done waxing poetic about the eyes on the veritable Redford of retrievers, Leonberg also pointed out another benefit of his dog’s particular coloration.

“He’s got this pink nose, this pink pigment, which means his eyes are a little bit more human,” he said. “He has [a distinct] iris and a pupil. Every dog has an iris and a pupil, but usually you can’t tell [them apart], because it looks just like a black doll’s eye. With Indy, he has a white of his eye, a little bit of color [with the iris], and a pupil, which just makes it a little bit easier to read his emotion or project your own emotion onto him.”

How to train your human

Unlike Tonic, the scene-stealing cat in “Pet Sematary” and “Caught Stealing,” Indy is not a trained animal actor; nor are his humans seasoned animal trainers. In fact, they realized early into the filmmaking process that attempting to teach him to perform a certain skill on command – such as hitting a mark or looking at a particular object – wouldn’t work for this film.

“When he was younger, way before we knew we were doing this, he had some basic obedience training,” Fischer noted. “But the way we made the film and were able to get these natural performances was actually by not really using that very much. Because as soon as you really interact with him, he loves to have a job, so his expression totally changes if you put him through his paces of like, ‘Sit down,’ ‘Roll over.'”

“He looks thrilled in a way that is not conducive to horror,” explained Leonberg.

Indeed, perked up ears with a tongue lolling does not read as scared so much as “squirrel!” The film needed a new approach, and that meant starting with retraining the humans. For specific Indy and Todd scenes, Leonberg provided the body that interacted onscreen. Ditto for Fischer, who stood in for Todd’s sister Vera and other female characters. In this way, Indy naturally followed their lead for the specific moods conveyed. If they acted startled, he would also look startled. If they needed him to appear worn out, they kept their own energy low. “We had to change our behavior when we were trying to get him to do things because he would mirror us,” said Fischer.

Fortunately, the creative decision to relate the story from Indy’s point of view meant that neither of the owners’ faces were seen onscreen. Most scenes filmed with a human are seen from the waist down or with the human’s face conveniently obscured, reminiscent of how the “Peanuts” cartoons depict a kid’s perspective of adults.

“Charlie Brown and ‘The Muppet Babies,’ – the other show where you see the adults always from the waist down,” acknowledged Leonberg. “It’s both a practical and a creative consideration. Practically, just because we are just 19 inches off the ground, because that’s how tall Indy’s eyeline is, most humans are framed out. Creatively, just because we wanted to anchor things so thoroughly in Indy’s point of view, that was happening naturally with just the way the story was structured.”

The fears that permeate “Good Boy,” however, increasingly rely on Indy moving about alone – such as peeking around a corner or following the specter of a dog long gone from this world. For these more complex solo behaviors Fischer and Leonberg were once again called on to be active participants albeit off camera. They coaxed performances from Indy using a painstaking process of setting up experiences for him to react to, whether it was strategically employing food or creating a noise that’s novel to Indy.

“So much of the performance is engaging his senses or curiosity in a way that is genuine, not to the context of the film, but when filmed in a certain way, looks like it’s all part of this tense horror build-up,” said Leonberg. “So we would do things like he will literally follow his nose. Using his food you can make a bread crumb trail – not actual bread – that will guide him from point A to point B.

“And then it’s all about how you prompt him and have him enter a scene that will bring an energy that will feel like a performance. It was having the camera rolling in the right place at the right time, and then the right stimuli to get that reaction.”

Fischer elaborated, “Whatever reaction shot you’re seeing, he’s just reacting to us saying funny words like ‘neon sign’ or ‘chicken’ or something like ‘quack a duck.’ We really had to run through a Rolodex of sounds, because he’s too smart and would learn the words. So then we had to try something else.”

The sound and the furry

Cobbling together that performance meant that mixers had to rebuild the entire soundscape of the film – not only to cut out the spoken prompts by Indy’s humans, but to also incorporate the actual scripted dialogue for actors Shane Jensen and Arielle Friendman who performed Todd and Vera, respectively, in addition to blending in sound effects and music.

“Kari and I could stand in for the human talent that we were in the scene with Indy, but I would not say we were acting. We weren’t,” said Leonberg. “We were standing in, and then the actors come in and replace the voice. It’s the same way James Earl Jones does Darth Vader’s voice on top of David Prowse’s onscreen presence.

“They need to deliver all the lines and interact with one another in a way that is selling the performance and the stakes of the scene,” he continued. “But then they also had to match the physicality of what we were doing. There’s times where, I sit up because of something Indy was doing. Shane Jensen, who’s doing the [voice] performance now, has to say the line while sitting up. If you don’t do it, it sounds false in a way.”

In addition, since most of the movie is told from Indy’s POV, the film keeps human dialogue to a minimum. Todd occasionally talks to his sister on the phone or briefly greets a neighbor, but for the majority of the film, Todd only speaks to Indy.

“[The dialogue] was absolutely one of the hardest things to get right. Everybody talks to their pets; it’s so specific . . . it’s so genuine. But if it’s false, it feels so wrong. So that took a lot of getting right. That was one of the things we worked with the most, and having it feel not expositional. It was definitely a balancing act.”

When it came to the canine side of the cast, Indy had to give his own vocal performance and could not fall back on professional actors to dub him.

“All the vocalizations you hear in the film come from Indy, but they’re totally out of context,” said Leonberg. “We had separate situations where we would film with him, usually wildly different from the scene. The things that sound like grunts and groans are when he gets his belly scratched. So it’s a lot of belly scratch noises, a lot of sounds he makes while playing fetch, that – when isolated and then fussed with by the sound designers and mixers – sounds like a performance. They did incredible work.”

Oh the humanity

Despite the film’s grim subject matter, it also probes the responsibility that an owner has not to just provide food and lodging, but to also note the other environmental factors that could affect a pet. While many pets seen on social media are now communicating with their owners via language buttons, this also demonstrates that these animals are receptive to receiving messages. That means humans can provide a reciprocal reassurance in troubling times. And of all the destabilizing events in a pet’s life, it is having their owner disappear – due to a divorce, illness, natural disaster or other more horrifying fate.

Leonberg and Fischer did not rush making “Good Boy,” taking the time – three years in fact – to ensure both Indy’s cooperation but also his happiness. Certainly being the body double for Todd helped sell Indy’s naturally loving performance. “Indy will crawl out of bed and weave in between Todd’s legs and look up at him just adoringly, like he really loves him, because that’s what we do every day,” said Leonberg.

“They say horror and comedy is so similar in the filmmaking that they both have setup, expectations rising, then there’s a punch line,” he continued. “The biggest difference in the making of them is that making a comedy is supposed to be funny. Making a horror film is never horrifying. This was kind of hilarious what was actually being said on camera to elicit the performance [that] you see.”

Fischer added, “It is really amazing how much people respond to and project their emotions onto him and say he looks like he’s so scared. I promise you, he was just thinking, ‘What are mom and dad doing?’ There’s definitely never any actual moment in which he was ever scared or anything like that. That’s the magic of movie-making.”

The credits also provide clues that occasionally, the film set must have felt like a doggie daycare. Max, who plays the other dog Bandit, is Indy’s puppy pal and belongs to Leonberg’s parents. Plus, the “Production Pups” – a nod to the “Production Babies” often listed in the credits born during the filmmaking process – Amos and Jake are also “great friends of Indy.”

Leonberg and Fischer reflected on their relationship with Indy after making the film.

“I don’t think we could have loved him any more when we started making this movie to how we feel about him now,” said Leonberg. “We went to the trouble of putting our own dog in a movie for three years. We were already huge fans of Indy.

“But the expression said all the time is, ‘We don’t deserve dogs.’ It is true. They love us unconditionally, and we take care of them, but they take care of us just as much.”

“Good Boy” is currently in theaters.

 

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