The dog stares into a dark corner.
On the surface, it looks like nothing’s there, but something isn’t right.
The whole house seems as if it is quaking with an undefinable dread.
And like most dogs, Indy, a bright-eyed Nova Scotia duck tolling retriever, can sense things many people can’t.
But he’s not just “the dog.”
He’s the protagonist in “Good Boy,” a new horror film told from the dog’s point of view.
Indy is the real-life dog of director Ben Leonberg, who filmed the movie, which opens in theaters Friday, over the course of three years in a woodsy New Jersey home.
“I did not think he was gonna be the movie star he turned out to be,” Leonberg tells NJ Advance Media.
The Indy-centric trailer for the film (watch below) has been seen millions of times since its release in August, and this week people will be watching the dog’s rapt expression up on the big screen in theaters across the country.
So it’s appropriate that when Leonberg appears on Zoom from Los Angeles to talk about the movie, the copper-coated Indy is right by his side.
The director lifts his constant pal up to the screen for a quick hello.
For the purposes of this interview, we’ll be only quoting Leonberg (sorry). But naturally, the 8-year-old retriever is the most pressing subject at hand.
And he’s very on-brand. Indy plays a dog named Indy in an indie film.
Leonberg and his wife, “Good Boy” producer Kari Fischer, have had the dog since he was a puppy.
“We definitely didn’t think he was gonna be in a movie when we first got him,” says the director, who also grew up in New Jersey. “We got him just to be our friend and companion. Figuring out how to make a movie around him was a long journey.”
And why not?
As he notes, some couples restore old homes. Rebuild classic cars.
They made a horror film with their dog.
“It was a very odd family project we were doing,” Leonberg says.
Thanks to their combined efforts, “Good Boy” has some of the best “dog acting” you’ll ever see.
The movie, which is Leonberg’s feature directorial debut, is a haunted house story. Todd, Indy’s owner in the film (Shane Jensen), decides to start living at the house in the woods where his grandfather died under mysterious circumstances, despite the reservations of his sister Vera (Arielle Friedman).
While Todd struggles with health problems like bloody coughing and wheezing, Indy, who is is fiercely dedicated to his owner, senses a suspicious presence in the house. Everything unfolds from the dog’s perspective as he tracks the mysterious entity closing in on them.
Indy’s devotion to Todd and brave vigilance in protecting him has touched the human audience.
“After screenings, people come up and say ‘oh, my dog does the same thing,’ or cat or parrot, which is one of my favorite reactions I’ve ever heard,” Leonberg says. “There’s something deep and almost primal about the relationship we have between ourselves and our dogs. It’s a relationship we’ve had for over 10,000 years.”
Indy faces a sinister force in the house, but his bond with Todd is the heart of the movie, says the director, who wrote the movie with Alex Cannon.
“We just intuitively understand that dog loves this guy because we see their relationship so plainly in the beginning of the film, so that when things start going bad, it’s easy to imagine, yeah, of course the dog would do anything to protect him.”
The art — and mechanics — of dog horror
Leonberg’s journey to make the film with Indy took him back home to New Jersey.
The director spent his formative years in South Jersey, in Moorestown, Burlington County. But his time making “Good Boy” landed him closer to the similar-sounding Morristown 85 miles north.
When Indy was a puppy, Leonberg and Fischer, who works as a scientific program officer at the Lupus Research Alliance, were living in Astoria, Queens.
“I started making these short films with him as I was writing the script for ‘Good Boy’ just to figure out how would you even make a movie from a dog’s point of view?” he says.
Leonberg, 37, came up with the idea to make a dog the protagonist of the story through the kind of “what if” prompt favored by Stephen King (like “what if a teenage girl develops psychic powers?” for “Carrie”). He applied it to the classic 1982 horror movie “Poltergeist,” directed by Tobe Hooper from a story by Steven Spielberg.
He had been watching the film in 2012 when a “what if?” popped into his head — what if only the dog knew the house was haunted?
“What if the dog that is staring at an empty corner or barking at nothing really was seeing the supernatural?” Leonberg says. “Because I think everyone can relate to that … ‘why is my dog barking in the middle of the night for no reason?’”
To make a movie with a dog as the main character, Leonberg started recreating known horror movie scenes to suss out point-of-view and perspective.
“Technically, it’s so challenging,” he says.
One of the shorts he filmed with Indy, also called “Good Boy,” is based on a scene that would become part of the feature.
As the dog fixates on the shadowy recesses of the back of a car, his expressions of what we’d interpret as fear and terror are gripping on their own. They seem doubly so because he is a dog and we know they pick up on things we don’t.
How do you get a dog to look like he can credibly vie for an Oscar?
“I think Indy does have some superpowers,” Leonberg says. “One is that he has this really intense, unblinking, unpanting stare, and coupled with this kind of natural curiosity and the fact that he’s a very smart dog who loves to solve a problem — if you give him a command he wants to figure out what that means — we were able to figure out how to make a movie around him.“
So really, no dog “acting” required.
“It looks like a performance, but so much of it is not coming from Indy,” he says. “It’s coming from the filmmaking and even the audience.”
Another of Indy’s features set the stage for Leonberg’s dog-horror.
“He has this kind of naturally neutral expression,” says the director, who is also the “Good Boy” cinematographer.
“There’s these scenes where we can get shots of Indy where he walks into a close-up and has this dramatic look off-camera, which is very, in reality, neutral. And what’s happening is, the gears are turning as I, off-camera, am … making some kind of silly noise or doing something to get his attention while telling him to stay where he is. We then see the reverse of the reverse shot, his point of view, so we have this shot of this dog looking intently, then we’ve got a shot of an empty corner where a shadow moves.
“And then when we cut back to Indy, he takes a small step back, and in concert with all the music and sound design, it seems like something really scary is going on. Indy is not scared. The film is telling you to be scared, and then you project that feeling onto Indy.”
While Indy is the entire film, he’s not exactly a showbiz dog.
“He does not know he’s in a movie,” Leonberg says.
But he did start to recognize the camera as a cue that “something was about to happen,” the director says — much like a leash signaling an impending walk.
Each day of filming meant setting up games for Indy.
“He’s the kind of dog that loves to have a job,” the director says, especially when a treat or tennis ball is the reward.
Not only did Indy go to sleep tired every night — “the sign of a happy dog,” Leonberg says — all the “tricks” also paid off.
After the movie trailer (watch clip below) racked up more than a million views on YouTube in a matter of days — the film’s distributors, Independent Film Company (formerly IFC) and Shudder, moved to switch the film from a planned limited release to wide release.
The positive response built on the film’s warm reception at Austin’s South by Southwest Festival in March, where “goodest boy” Indy and his “humans” won the Howl of Fame Award.
‘Does the dog die?’ is the wrong question
For Indy, part of the movie’s puzzle is finding out what his on-screen owner is up to.
“The audience only sees the film through Indy’s eyes, but the audience is human, and they understand things Indy doesn’t,” Leonberg says. “So there are things where Indy understands in a very basic, maybe even childlike way, that something’s wrong with Todd. The audience has been given more clues.”
Todd being in danger agitates Indy, and the way he experiences that threat heightens the haunt.
“I think that limited perspective of just sticking with Indy as the point-of-view character so rigidly makes those emotional beats land all the harder,” says the director.
One concern people have had after watching the film’s trailer is that classic question “does the dog die?”
“I think most ghost stories and haunted house films, they are about our relationship to mortality,” Leonberg says. “This film is kind of the inversion of the way most people, or a lot of people, learn about death and dying … they learn about it through their pets.
“Most of our first experiences with losing a family member can be from a dog or a cat or a pet, and this film imagines what it might be like for a dog to experience it … The shoe’s on the other paw, so to speak. We’re seeing what it’s like to see a family member, through the eyes of a dog, battling encroaching mortality.”
The director found inspiration in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” for the ambiguity between what Indy’s experiencing and what’s really happening. He also thought about animals who can sense medical problems.
“A dog detecting an invisible, necrotic force — what’s the difference between that and a ghost?“ Leonberg says.
The comedy of life in a ‘haunted’ house
Once they had their horror hero, Leonberg and Fischer spent a while looking for a house where they could film the movie.
It wouldn’t just be a film set — it would also be their home for several years.
“We definitely lived the production and built our schedule and the filmmaking style around Indy, and it’s for his comfort and focus that we did that,” Leonberg says. “Every time you take your dog to a new place, they have to smell and inspect the location, whereas if Indy treats the location we’re filming in as home, it’s very easy just to ask him to come into the living room to spend a few hours with us in the evening filming the day’s scene.”
They settled on a house in Harding Township, Morris County — “the boonies” of the film (as often happens in the region, the mailing address was in Morristown).
“You can get from that spooky cabin in the woods to New York City in just under an hour (with little traffic), which surprises a lot of people, but New Jersey folks will well understand,” Leonberg says.
They filmed “Good Boy” on nights and weekends in a total of 400 days over the three-year period, with each “day” being relatively short.
“Working with a dog is kind of like working with a really little kid,” Leonberg says. “They just have a very limited attention span. And once the attention span is spent, you just need to stop. You just get diminishing returns.”
While they were living on set, they were by no means living inside a horror movie or haunted house. (Apart from the rain machines and lightning effects.)
“Making a scary movie is never actually scary,” Leonberg says. “It’s just kind of funny and hilarious a lot of times.
“My wife and I, we’ll set up a camera in a room. I’ll spend the whole day rigging the lights, the special effects. My wife finishes her work day, and I tell her to hide behind the coat rack.
“I turn on the camera, and I start making kissy sounds to have Indy come in … And then right when he hits the perfect spot, my wife goes, ‘quack, quack, quack, quack, quack’ and he turns and looks. You replace all the audio, it looks like a performance. It looks like he’s investigating a floorboard that’s creaking on its own.”
Dump trucks and big skies
Leonberg, who is also a professor of film, got his first education in moviemaking while roaming his home turf.
The Eagle Scout would hang out in the woods filming near Moorestown, Cherry Hill and Cinnaminson, with early subjects being “very lame skateboarding tricks.” He’d also recreate movies with friends.
“We made our own version of ‘Indiana Jones’ with my cousins,” he says. “So, not surprising why my dog has the name he does.”
Leonberg kept up his film hobby through high school, then attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where filmmaking wasn’t a major, but he studied it anyway. After college, he got jobs in commercial video. The fledgling director, who had been a long-distance runner in high school and college, made sneaker ads for Reebok and Adidas. He also worked with virtual reality.
“I think I’ve always had a knack for challenging and unusual film production,” he says.
Leonberg has also been known to operate heavy machinery, which has proven useful on film sets. He started out in high school as a dump truck driver for his family’s landscaping supply company.
Just as the COVID-19 pandemic was about to change everything, he went from being the creative director of an immersive media company to prepping for “Good Boy,” which wasn’t originally supposed to film in New Jersey.
When the production was postponed, he started driving the dump truck for his family business again.
“It actually was a really good job during the pandemic, especially when things were really locked down,” he says. “People got really into gardening … You would show up with a truck full of, like, mulch and stone … It felt like you were delivering Christmas.”
But it was deflating to know the film was on hold.
“It felt like ‘wow, that really didn’t work out quite right,’” Leonberg says.
He and Fischer weren’t deterred. They readjusted their plan.
“We moved from one Moorestown to the other Morristown, made the house look like a haunted house, and picked right back up,” he says.
Leonberg, who has a master’s degree in directing from Columbia University, worked as an adjunct at the college’s undergraduate film program while filming “Good Boy.”
In 2023, he received a fellowship grant from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts for a draft of the “Good Boy” script.
“That grant came in at a wonderful time to actually help finish the film,” he says. “The finish line was in sight. We still had a year left of the movie, but things were really coming together.”
When the film entered postproduction, he got a full-time job as an assistant film professor at Montana State University in Bozeman.
He and Fischer, who are both fans of mountains and the cold, have called Big Sky Country home for the last year. Indy has also taken to the mountain air.
The family just took a road trip from Montana to LA for a “Good Boy” premiere, then set their sights on driving cross-country to New York for more movie promotion.
“Good Boy” has occupied a sizable chunk of Indy’s life, but all the while, he never stopped doing his other job — being an adoring companion to those humans of his.
“His favorite place to sleep was under the desk where I would be editing the film as we were making it,” Leonberg says. “So he was there the whole time.”
“Good Boy,” rated PG-13, runs 1 hour and 12 minutes and is now playing in New Jersey theaters. The movie opens wide Friday, Oct. 3.