A Constant Visual Feast

When I complain about the number of journalists covering horror who don’t really have a background in horror, it’s for good reason. I can safely say that no one’s asked Ben Leonberg, director of the excellent Good Boy, about Cat’s Eye, a 1985 anthology horror movie that ends with a cat protecting Drew Barrymore from a troll; the reason I can say so is that when I asked Ben about Cat’s Eye, he sat upright in his chair on the other side of our Zoom call. 

Maybe General isn’t the primary reference for Good Boy‘s animal performance, but it’s pretty clear to me that his DNA is present in Leonberg’s movie, even if Good Boy is about a dog and not a cat; and maybe I should avoid gatekeeping, but it just bothers me to see other critics performing authority over a genre most of them didn’t give a shit about until 2017. 

Anyways. Let’s not take away from Good Boy, one of the year’s strongest horror movies, or from its star, Indy, who is in fact a very good boy, even though he didn’t stick around for my interview with Ben and producer Kari Fischer (who are married, and also Indy’s people). It’s worth asking what we owe to the animals in our lives, and that question rolls around in Good Boy‘s terrifying and ultimately tragic narrative. 

You can read the full feature over at The Daily Beast.