This essay contains spoilers for Good Boy (2025).
As a child, I had an odd relationship with horror. I wasn’t a particularly brave child but I wasn’t the most easily frightened either. I can remember a few Doctor Who episodes that really got under my skin in primary school, but surely that’s the relationship every British child has with Blink and The Impossible Planet. I yelped at the TV but ultimately I slept fine and didn’t have nightmares. What truly ruined me and made me a blubbering mess for hours or days at a time was things being sad.
One time I told my dad I wanted to read Animal Farm because it sounded really cool for a lot of animals to take over a farm together. My dad said maybe I should wait a bit and I might not like it because something sad happened to a horse. I cried to the point of nausea for hours and hours about how awful the thing I didn’t know about, that happened to a horse that wasn’t real, in a book I hadn’t read, might be. I saw a picture of some kind of lego figure that was a prince where you could put a scary monster mask over his face. Then I cried for hours about how awful it would be for his parents not to recognise him and think he was a monster, because I was horrified by the idea that an imaginary man represented by a lego toy I didn’t own might be made sad by (reversibly) becoming a monster. Spooky ghosts bothered me far less.
Now I’m grown up and fascinated by horror. It’s not quite that I never find it scary, more that watching it with analytical eyes means I’m using a different part of my brain to interact with it than the part that could get scared. The only horror movie that’s ever truly got under my skin is the (magnificent) 2017 British indie horror Ghost Stories. I can’t tell you why it got to me because it would mean spoiling the entire ending, but if you’re content to look up some trigger warnings if you need them, I truly truly recommend it for this Halloween.
So this is the context in which I watched Good Boy, a film about a haunted house from the perspective of the dog, a Canadian duck retriever, who is the only one who can see the ghost and must protect his owner. This essay is sort of a review, but not really, because I don’t know how to write a proper review. Instead, it’s a response to the sentiment I’ve seen in a lot of reviews that this isn’t really a horror movie, it’s just a sad movie. I disagree with all that. I think horror movies are often sadder than the Marley and Me-type tearjerkers. Most of what we find scary is frightening for a minute and sad for a long time after. Most horror movies ask you to confront the inevitability of death and the idea you can’t save people. Once your heart rate has returned to normal after the jump scare, death isn’t frightening, but it is sad.
I’ll give you a quick introduction to Good Boy if you’ve not seen or read about it. I’ll do the whole plot in this paragraph, so do skip if you don’t want to learn the whole plot. Alternatively, if you can’t stand the idea of watching a beautiful dog experience peril, read this and you won’t have to see the movie. A man called Todd moves with his dog Indy to an isolated rural house, left to him by his dad. Todd is suffering from the same chronic lung disease as his dad and it’s getting worse. Indy becomes aware of a presence in the house and is determined to protect Todd, but Todd pushes him away as his sickness gets worse. It is unclear whether the being in the basement is a ghost, the spectre of the lung disease worsening, or if both are aspects of each other. Indy is with Todd when he succumbs to either the disease, or the ghost, or both, in the basement. Todd tells him he’s a good dog. The movie ends with Todd’s sister Vera opening up the basement and Indy, who has learned something about love and death, runs up the stairs to meet her.
I saw the trailer for Good Boy when I went to see The Long Walk with my friend Will a couple of weeks back. As we left the cinema we did our standard talk through of all the trailers we’d seen and whether we thought they sounded good for our next movie trip (if you want to hear my thoughts about The Long Walk, you can — read it, it’s good). Will said Good Boy sounded like the one movie he absolutely couldn’t see and I said maybe I could, but definitely not in the cinema. A couple of days after that I got an email offering me the chance to watch the film before its UK release date so I could talk about it on my TikTok. I was delighted to get to see a film I thought would be really good, but I was also terrified about what it was going to do to me.
If you’re wondering (and I know everyone is) nothing truly awful happens to beautiful Indy in the film. He has his leg trapped painfully at one point but gets free. His owner pushes him away from him off the bed at one point, and my heart broke, but both we and Indy know that Todd loved him until the last moment of his life. There’s a moment where we wonder if Indy will be left in the basement at the end and never be found, but the movie’s final shot is of kind, caring Vera calling Indy to her, and we know she will love and take care of him. Indy finishes the movie safe and loved.
The real horror and sadness of the film is the enormity of the love Indy has for Todd. There are some movies we could call ‘romance horror movies’ that make fierce and real love an element of the horror, for example the five star phenomenal Bones and All. But Good Boy goes deeper than all of them into the real horror potential of absolute unconditional love. Todd is Indy’s whole world both emotionally and logistically. We know that without his owner, Indy won’t get fed, and even aside from that, he has no conception of the world outside his love for his owner. If my boyfriend wouldn’t let me sit with him after a long day I’d be sad but I’d go and find something else to do. Indy has loved Todd completely, for his entire life, as his only strong connection in the world and the prism through which he understands everything.
Horror is dialed up massively when these are the stakes. The strange, inventive camera angles in this film put you completely inside Indy’s perspective, close to the ground. You really don’t feel human when you watch it. The idea of loving anyone or anything that much is horrifying to me, lifelong love without language, where the idea that someone won’t be close to you forever is impossible to explain or make okay. Indy can only comprehend the idea that he won’t be with Todd forever through experiencing it. I paused the movie around three quarters of the way through to go and find my cat and make sure she understood how much I love her.
An interview with the filmmaker from the Today Show discussed the idea that the ending of the movie isn’t necessarily sad. It puts a common story in reverse. A lot of people learn to understand mortality by losing a pet and understanding they can never bring them back. What does that story look like the other way round? If the film is a bildungsroman, and we have watched Indy understand something profound about the universe, then that’s painful but not automatically sad in the long run. We’ve watched a dog learn in the way a dog learns, by living. Ben Leonberg, the writer and director, couldn’t bring himself to give Indy a truly awful ending. He was never going to leave Indy in that basement. It’s clear from the film that Vera will take good care of him. So Indy runs up the stairs at the end of the movie to a world he has learned about the only way he can. Man and dog finish the movie knowing they love each other. It’s a deep, fascinating take on mortality from a profoundly non-human lens, and the ecocritic in me is absolutely obsessed with it. It’s a movie that could only have been made by a thoughtful, intelligent man willing to decentre human characters and put the way a dog sees in the middle of his story.
It’s hard to watch for us because I really do think sadness cuts deeper than horror. I am tearing up as I write this, pausing several times a sentence. Could a horror movie have done that to me? Does Michael Myers chasing anyone through an alleyway do that? Does Ghostface jumping out of a cupboard? It’s deep, slow horror that you learn about yourself from as you let it settle into you over time. It’s horror that leaves you richer for having been scared, and having been sad. It’s not not a horror movie, it’s just a very original one. I don’t know if I’ve convinced anyone to watch it or not based on this essay. I’ve certainly made myself cry. But the project is definitely something that was deeply, deeply worth doing.
Credit for title image: Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash.
