THURSDAY'S SCRIPT TIP:

CORE CHANGE FOR ORIGINALITY:
GOOD BOY

You are writing a haunted house screenplay. There have been probably a million haunted house movies over the years, beginning with the first horror film back in 1896... and the second one in 1897. Add to that the millions of novels about haunted houses that have been written over the centuries of fiction writing and fables. How do you make your story different? How do you make your story something special?

Great question, and something that writers and filmmakers need to think about more often.

One of the ways is to change the type of place being haunted - think of all of the various paces that people die, and each of those can be haunted by that dead dude or dudette. But we’ve had haunted hospitals and haunted mental institutions and haunted apartments and probably even a haunted outhouse or two by now. I can’t think of a single location that hasn’t been haunted in some film (if *you* think of one, and do a search and find out that nobody has ever used that location before? Write it!).

So what else can we change to make our story original?

Not a superficial change, but a CORE change. One change that changes everything else. Location can be one of those things - a Haunted Space Station. Genre change can also work - a comedy about a Haunted Outhouse. In action movies sometimes they change the sex of the protagonist - so we get BALLERINA (and all of the films that came before and will come after that film)... that’s not really a core change, more of a cosmetic change - But often swapping hero and villain in a story gives you a completely different story. Which brings us to Point Of View/ Protagonist change - telling the action film from the villain’s point of view might be interesting, because it really does make major changes.

So Point Of View - the lead character whose story we are telling - might be the next thing to consider if we are trying to make our Haunted House movie different than the thousands of others. We’ve had a few stories told from the point of view of the ghosts on screen - BEETLEJUICE and GHOST and a film from 2001 that would be a spoiler if I typed in the title. We’ve also had a few turns of the screw of people who think the house is haunted, but maybe it’s just them? And we’ve had kids who can see dead people, and adults who they share this with. So *who* haven’t we seen dealing with a haunted house?

What about a dog?

Man’s best friend. Dogs are supposed to be hyper sensitive to things like ghosts and evil stuff, so how about a movie that’s all about a dog protecting its human from all of the scary things in a haunted house that the dog can sense, but the human doesn’t?

MAN’S BEST FRIEND

GOOD BOY (2025) is told entirely from the Dog’s point of view. The entire film is “dog’s eye view” - we often just see the legs of humans - and the dog is doing everything to protect their human and even communicate with their human that they are in danger, but the human misunderstands and think the dog is just being a bad dog. The communication issue is a great element in a story if the dog is our protagonist.

And GOOD BOY takes that idea and runs with it, and is the most fascinating haunted house movie I have seen in years. It’s genuinely scary, filled with dread and suspense, will have you jumping out of your seat a few times, and is intense. And also deals with the unconditional love that a dog has for its human. It’s LASSIE in a haunted house, but Timmy hasn’t fallen into a well, Timmy is in serious danger that he can’t see, and all of the barking in the world isn’t getting that unseen danger across to the human.

Our hero Indy is an adult (Nova Scotia Duck Tolling) Retriever, yellowish brown with a white streak running down the middle of his face. He looks after his human, Todd (though I’m going to just call him “Indy’s human” because I don’t want you to think this movie is in any way about Todd - it’s about a good boy), who has some sort of serious medical issue and is in and out of the hospital often. Indy is worried about his human.

After returning from the hospital, Indy’s human decides to move to his late Grandfather’s house in the middle of the woods. The human’s ancestral home, with a graveyard out back with generations of the human’s family... all died at a young age. The place has been abandoned after the human’s grandfather died, and is dark and spooky. A haunted house. The human often gets phone call’s from his worried sister - the house is miles away from civilization, away from hospitals and ambulances and doctors. She thinks the human made a mistake moving there. The human says that his grandfather left a VHS tape player and a box of horror movies to watch, he will be fine.

But Indy has sensed strange things in the house. Things that move without being touched by any human. A chair in the attic that creaks as if someone is sitting in it. Terrible smells coming from the basement door... and the human has to go down into the basement to turn on the power and click on the breaker switches when the lights go out in a storm. Indy’s human doesn’t seem to understand Indy’s warnings.

When they take a walk in the woods, Indy smells something, and finds a bunch of animal skeletons - maybe other dogs - in a burrow. Indy’s human doesn’t understand when Indy tries to lead him there. In a nice bit of “schlock shock” another human startles Indy’s human - the neighbor Hunter from across the woods - who tells Indy’s human that foxes have been eating all of the animals in the area. He has set traps for the foxes, but can’t seem to capture them. Indy wonders if the animal skeletons were foxes, and if something is eating all of the animals in the woods.

UNSEEN DANGERS

Most of the story takes place in the haunted house, where Indy senses all kinds of danger and sees things moving on their own that his human doesn’t notice. You know how dogs are always sniffing around at something? In this story, that something is ghosts and places where people died and all kinds of things that are just wrong about this house. All of those heightened dog senses come into play in this story, and the dog actor playing Indy does some amazing things - sometimes hitting three specific marks in one shot, turning it’s head to look at something that is moving on its own, running and hiding under the bed when something is creeping up the stairs to the bedroom. Throughout the entire film, the dog is the focus and the dog gives an Oscar caliber performance.

There is a creepy “shadow monster” - like a human covered in black oil - that keeps trying to grab Indy’s human, but only Indy can see it. The human thinks there’s nothing there. The “shadow monster” lives in the basement (also filled with animal bones) where there’s a creepy cave-like opening into darkness that Indy’s human can’t see. The “shadow monster” leaves black oily footprints that only Indy can see - and those footprints are often moving closer and closer to Indy’s human’s bed!

The more Indy tries to warn his human that this “shadow monster” is coming for him, the more Indy’s human thinks that Indy is misbehaving and a “bad dog”... which eventually lands Indy in the dog house... outside... chained to a post... unable to protect his human from the “shadow monster”. And that chain attached to the post? Makes it difficult for Indy to protect himself from the “shadow monster”.

THAT CORE CHANGE

Using the dog’s point of view completely changes the haunted house movie. Not only do we see it from a different (and much lower) angle, but the dog’s ability to sense things but not communicate to the human in the story is kind of like the audience yelling at the screen “Don’t go down those stairs!” to the people on screen in a horror movie. The dog also sees the ghost of his human’s grandfather’s dog, and one dog is warning the other about dangerous places in the house that humans shouldn’t go near. We, as the audience, get these messages - but the human doesn’t. This movie uses the idea of dogs being able to sense things, and shows us what they see that we can’t see. They show us what is making those bad smells. They show us the things haunting the house that the human is unaware of. Changing the point of view reinvents the haunted house story by opening up possibilities that don’t exist with a human protagonist. Don’t even exist with a ghost protagonist.

And the dog star (also named Indy - to keep from confusing the real dog) does so many amazing things on camera, from walking right up to the camera for a close up, to looking to the side just as something over there starts to movie on its own, to looking around a room before entering it, to going right up to the one chair in the attic that is making squeaking noises, to doing those complicated shots where it hits three specific marks within a single shot (something that human actors have problems with), that you come away from this film wondering how they did it. Where did they find this dog? Was it a dozen different dogs that they painted that distinctive white stripe down the front of all of their faces so that they looked the same?

No. It’s all one dog. The film director’s dog. And in a short “making of” feature after the tail credits he explains how he took his normal, not very talented dog... and make him do all of these amazing things on camera. How he got that dog to show fear and concern and joy and all of the other *emotions* this dog displays on his face in shots. How the dog hit all of those marks perfectly. How the dog could turn his head to look into some dark corner of the attic on cue. And even after seeing all of these tricks that they used? That dog still deserves an Oscar.

But the idea of completely reinventing the haunted house movie by changing the point of view character, the audience’s identification character, from a human in the haunted house to a dog trying to protect his human in a haunted house is what makes this film original and interesting and amazing.

So when you are looking at some horror trope like the “Haunted House” that has been done a million times before? Think about what you can change at a basic level (like instead of seeing it through human eyes, seeing it though a dog’s eyes) that will make all of the cliches suddenly new and fresh. If we have seen this story a million times before, what point of view have we never seen it from? How does that point of view change everything about the story?

GOOD BOY Directed by Ben Leonberg, written by Leonberg and Alex Cannon, starring Indy, Shane Jensen, Stuart Rudin, Arielle Friedman, and Larry Fessenden is currently in cinemas, then SHUDDER streming service.

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