What does it mean to be a dog in a haunted house?

Good Boy (2025) is the only horror movie I'll see this Halloween season

Contains spoilers for Good Boy (2025) – but also it’s a horror movie with a basic plot, so does that really count as spoilers?

Here goes: Indy is a dog, who’s (un-named?) owner is sick of some kind of pulmonary illness that makes him vomit liters of blood every so often. Dude isn’t happy his loving sister keeps telling him to get his ass to the hospital, and so he leaves his city apartment to hole himself up in his late grandpa’s home in the butthole of nowhere. Of course grandaddy died in it, of a similar lung problem, and so did his dog, and everyone thinks the house is haunted. Detractors will say it’s genetic but Indy (the dog) starts seeing things, the owner gets sicker, apparitions appear galore, dude dies, Indy is scared, the sister comes to pick him up (the dog, not the man – well his dead body will fit in the truck i guess).

For all you animal lovers out there: Indy survives the movie. He faces some scary moments—getting caught in a fox trap and being pushed off the bed one time, but he makes it through unscathed (although maybe a bit scared, and also totally sad his owner died).

So, what did I think? Well, I was scared shitless from seeing it in a dark room, on a huge screen, with super high sound volume; but even that’s not enough to brave the social anxiety of making everyone move out of the way in the middle of a super tense movie so I stayed put, put my fingers over my eyes and kinda peeped out once in a while.

Still, now that I’ve had a full week to think about it, I think I quite enjoyed it! It’s not the best movie in the world, I’ll get to that later, but I think it used its special moat in an interesting way!

What scares a dog?

The movie is fully from Indy’s pov. The camera follows him around and never leaves him. This leads to some really nice (non-scary) scenes when he’s in the car, door closed, while his owner is taking a call outside, and we barely get enough sound to understand the content of the conversation.

Something I found very interesting is how little they show the faces of people in the movie. I didn’t watch it again to verify (got traumatized enough on the first pass), but I’m pretty sure we only see the owner’s face once or twice, in the full 1h15 of the movie.

This allows us to focus strictly on Indy, and his emotions, without being parasited by his owner’s. On that note, it’s so interesting how easy it is to read those dog emotions and empathize with them. This isn’t even a dog “actor”, trained for the cinema! And yet, with the camera work and the atmosphere, I suspended my disbelief immediately and only saw the “puppet string” of the treat-on-a-stick for the first few scenes.

So, what does it mean to be a dog in a haunted house? Being a dog and seeing hallucinations isn’t as scary as being a human, in a way. I loved how the movie both adds tension and made me afraid, while also presenting the dog as mostly confused during the whole thing. Dogs don’t understand ghosts, at least not as we do.

The film weaponizes our need to project understanding onto Indy’s behavior. Every time he stared into an empty corner, I found myself constructing explanations, seeing patterns that might not exist. We think we can read dogs, but Good Boy keeps reminding us that we’re interpreting an alien experience of reality. The film’s genius lies in this disconnect: we’re watching a horror movie where the protagonist and audience aren’t even experiencing the same threats.

Indy isn’t that bothered about seeing the mud monster, unless it tries to touch him. The times Indy got scared are the times when he sniffed something out and followed the scent into the basement, where a combination of smell and sound gave him the scaries. Since the camera won’t let go of him, we see several long minutes of him staring out the window, to the still forest where our human senses can’t make anything out.

What’s a dog to do? Bark?

What can Indy do against the monster? He’s not a fearless German Shepherd, far from it. It’s established quite early on that he’s rather of a wimp, always sniffing stuff and whining. Indy does his job, and tries to do it well: regular patrol around the house, thorough investigations of weird scents, some little barking when things get really bad.

But in real life, what is there to do when your owner is dying, when you’re just a dog with no way of calling an ambulance or alerting a neighbor? Indy certainly knows his owner is dying, that his short tamper is just him in pain, that of course he doesn’t mean it when he yells at Indy to get off the bed. Still, Indy never stops trying, but in the end, all the whining and pawing and licking of faces won’t make his best friend less sick, or provide any comfort.

One of the most heartbreaking scenes for me was watching Indy navigate that impossible choice of love vs fear. He doesn’t have access to the story beats like we do – he can’t think “if i just hold out until morning, help will come! He lives in an eternal present, in which his owner sometimes loves him, and sometimes chains him to the doghouse outside. It’s ostensibly an act of mercy, to protect Indy from witnessing his last hours, but for Indy it’s abandonment. He can smell the monster coming but he’s left alone with this danger he can smell but not see.

When he finally manages to get free of the chain, and to run away from the monster, Indy doesn’t flee to the neighbor’s house as I had predicted, he actually comes back inside, into the bedroom, to check on his owner. By this point, the monster has killed him though, and so Indy finds his way into the basement, curls up next to the emaciated skeleton of his predecessor (grandpa’s dog, who presumably faced this same situation decades ago), and waits.

I’ve seen a few reviews say that it’s sad because Indy doesn’t understand death, but i don’t think that’s true: Indy very much understands death and disease, and that his owner is doomed to die that night. The monster isn’t there to show his confusion, he’s here to show how scary and disturbing that truth is, even when you are able to understand it.

Endnotes

I don’t know if the movie will be available to you where you are, but in France it’ll be on Shadowz, so you can watch it at home on Halloween. I really recommend it, just not stuck in the big dark room with strong sound volume like i was lol.

Have you seen it? If not, what other movie would you recommend i watch (from the safety of my home)?

See you next time,