Spoilers for Good Boy ahead.
Good Boy is a novel concept in the haunted-house genre — it’s told entirely from the point of view of a dog, and it’s got a surprisingly moving twist in its tail, sorry, tale. Co-written and directed by Ben Leonberg, who is also star pup Indy’s owner in real life, it tells the story of Todd (Shane Jensen), a man suffering with an unnamed serious illness, who takes his dog to live with him in his late grandfather’s old house in the country. But there’s eerie stuff going down on this old farmhouse, and Todd just won’t heed his furry best friend’s warnings.
When Good Boy premiered at SXSW earlier this year, it was the surprise hit of the festival, with one critic going as far as to dub Indy, a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever, as “one of the most emotive actors of his generation.” These plaudits have equally amused and bemused Leonberg. “Keep in mind, and I cannot say this enough,” he says, “Indy has no idea he’s in a movie. In the film it looks like he’s been through the wringer, but in reality he’s just rolling around in the mud having the time of his life.”
Leonberg first hit upon the idea of filming a horror movie from a dog’s perspective after watching Poltergeist, and playing with the idea of animals picking up on mysterious forces before their humans. Co-written with Alex Cannon and co-produced by Leonberg’s wife, Kari Fischer, the film was shot over three years in and around a New Jersey farmhouse. Fischer and Leonberg moved into the house during that time, with Indy leaning into his Hollywoof era by claiming a king-size bed in the guest room between takes. “We joked that it was essentially his trailer,” says Fischer. (During our Zoom interview, Indy is napping on a giant, cozy bed between the couple.)
In Good Boy, Indy investigates strange noises and ghostly apparitions in the remote country house. His eyes track things that may or may not exist across a room and tilts his head at uncanny sounds, as he attempts to understand what led to the death of Todd’s grandpa (Larry Fessenden) — was it a dark supernatural force? — and what happened to the man’s beloved dog, who has never been seen since.
Fischer and Leonberg coaxed out Indy’s performance themselves. “Indy obviously has no formal training,” says Fischer. “He’s just our dog! So every day we were thinking, How are we going to do X, Y, or Z?”
“If you make a silly sound off camera,” explains Leonberg, “He’ll react with a head tilt, and if you remove what we’re actually saying to him and add horror-movie sound design, it sounds like a floorboard has creaked and there’s a ghost appeared. It looks in the film like a profoundly scary scene, but really he’s just going, ‘Huh?’” A stunt double — a stuffed, soft-toy version of Indy called Findy — was also employed for some pivotal scenes. And in keeping with a dog’s perspective, the camera was set 19 inches from the floor, with most human faces high above, partly obscured.
A diva and his stunt double. Photo: Independent Film Company and Shudder Release
Clocking in at a tidy 73 minutes, Good Boy never outstays its welcome, and the spooky goings-on lead to a climax when a ghostly black figure that has been haunting Indy finally, monstrously, appears to pull Todd to hell. We know it’s all over for an increasingly sicker Todd, when he appears, defeated, covered in a ghoulish black goo, face-to-face with Indy. Leonberg lights up when I ask him what exactly this dark ectoplasm is. “I’m so glad you asked, as this is so exciting for me!” he says. “I actually play Todd in this scene. So it’s me, covered head to toe in liquefied mud. It’s a landscaping product called liquid soil, which is a really rich, dark black compost and dirt mixed together. Kari afterwards had to scrape it off me with a spatula and I had to get hosed down for like 30 minutes.” Indy, he recalls, had no problem shooting 20 takes to capture this scene; he was happy to splash around in mud.
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Indy fights to the very end for his owner, but shortly before Todd is hauled off to the underworld, he declares tearfully to Indy: “You’re a good dog, but you can’t save me.” This gut-punch line reveals the true nature of this film — it’s not so much about a ghoul haunting a house and claiming its newest victim, but an exploration of what animals understand about death and how they might react when their beloved owner is dying of a terminal illness.
“The big picture is, all ghost stories are essentially about the idea of mortality. I thought, A lot of us learn about death and dying through our pets, because they don’t live as long as us, but what would it be like if the shoe was on the other foot, if the animal were to experience the encroaching specter of death? It’s about our animals’ total innocence, and how the love we feel for our pets is so uncomplicated.”
After Todd’s death, the film’s final scene shows Indy, trapped, alone, in a cellar, apparently set for the same fate as Grandpa’s old doggo before him. Thankfully, Todd’s sister, Vera (Arielle Friedman), discovers Indy and sets him free, inspired by the final moments of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, says Leonberg. “Part of writing a haunted-house story is a little like making a roller-coaster ride where we’re always looking for one more scare, one more way for the audience to catch their breath so it’s thrilling up to the final moment. We’ve gone through so much dread for a long time, and we wanted to end on this ‘always darkest before dawn’ moment, where it’s ultimately a relief and it’s like, ‘Phew, he made it.’”
Presumably, the audience would have rioted otherwise. “Yeah, we were also very aware of that!” he says. Avid fans of DoesTheDogDie website can rest easy.
Stardom has since come easy to Indy — he’s already been recognized a few times in the street since the movie came out, and had quite a few nice head scratches from his adoring public — but he’s already considering semi-retirement. (“He might be up for a dog-food commercial at the Super Bowl, or something, though,” Leonberg half-jokes.) But this might not be the end of Indy’s story. “I’m very excited about perspective and how it can inform storytelling,” Leonberg says. “I certainly have ideas for a Good Boy 2. I have lots more to say and more to come, for sure.” It’d be a welcome return to the bark side.
