The Most Shocking Horror Movie of 2025 Came From a Deeply Personal Fear
Good Boy stands as a horror movie in a class of its own. Audiences have witnessed haunted house movies, but as opposed to highlighting screaming teens or fearless ghost investigators, it’s told from the perspective of a dog. (A Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever, to be precise.) In Good Boy, Indy the pup has to safeguard his owner as supernatural forces close in on their remote cabin.
At first scheduled for a limited release, this fast-paced, 90-minute thriller got a wide release after its trailer went viral, with viewers hurrying to search engines to find out if Indy survives. It's best not to disclose the ending here, but should you be interested where the idea for Good Boy came from in the first place, we've got you covered.
The Creative Spark Behind the Film
Rookie director Ben Leonberg, who’s also the real-life owner of Indy, says he wanted to create this movie to delve into the fears that every dog owner shares.
“I think it comes from a thought or maybe worry every dog owner has had, which is, ‘Why is my dog barking at nothing or staring at nothing?’” Leonberg states. “There's probably a perfectly valid reason for that, but the human imagination tends to imagine the worst, think ghosts. I wanted to play on that anxiety. Then, in the screenwriting and filming process, it was determining how to tell a story that really embraces that perspective, where we're limited to everything the dog can even understand as a way to have this narrative unfold.”
Good Boy is groundbreaking in the best way, captivating viewers immediately with a protagonist you can't help but care for and root for, excels at exposition, and employs offhand dialogue from other characters, especially since our protagonist can’t talk.
Building the Animal's Narrative
Leonberg asserts that his dog isn’t giving a performance, but rather it's the creative skill of the film that gives life to each scene. Indy is one of the most innocent protagonists in film history, and this fact is fully appreciated by its director.
“I think Indy, probably all dogs, all animals, are something of a shortcut for pulling on an audience's heartstrings because they are innocent,” Leonberg says. “They don't know they're in the movie. And there's a really interesting lesson just about performance, that he's not performing. I can't say that enough, he does not know he was in a movie, but through filmmaking, the sound design, the music, the shots, the lighting, you can effectively express an emotion and a feeling on his — what are otherwise neutral expressions — and the audience will attribute emotional depth onto him. I think that genuinely is how most of the movie works: the filmmaking is telling the audience how to feel, and then they're putting that emotion on. He's listening to us just make silly noises on set. And the audience says, Wow, I'm scared. So the dog must be scared. He's not. He's just trying to figure out what his mom and dad are doing.”
Including even the breed of dog, everything was carefully planned to fuel audience reactions.
“I think we relate to a dog like Indy,” Leonberg says, gesturing to the pet sitting behind him. “He's not very big, he's only 19 inches high. The camera operates 19 inches off the ground, which was challenging in filmmaking. But I don't know if you would want a big Cujo St Bernard; that would be such a daunting adversary for the supernatural.”
Indy is a bit small when it comes to beasts that might fight the supernatural.
“How could he possibly succeed? That's really good for a story,” Leonberg remarks. “Also stinking cute.”
Good Boy is in theaters now.
