There’s no better indicator that a trope has grown so tired that no one can stomach it anymore than when it has an entire website dedicated to warning against it. I’m talking, of course, about doesthedogdie.com, and the long history of dog death in horror. We can all name countless examples, even from the all-time classics of the genre. Michael Myers kills two dogs before the end credits roll on John Carpenter’s Halloween. There’s, well, all of Cujo and Man’s Best Friend. Hell, one of the biggest, most show-stopping sequences in The Thing revolves around the mutilation of dogs. There are countless examples – we wouldn’t need a website devoted to the question if there weren’t.
Killing a dog, or any animal, in a horror movie usually serves the purpose of getting the audience to know that whatever the threat is, it’s really bad, because it killed the family pet. Or it just provides an immediate shock, as people will always react viscerally to animal death, usually more than to the death of a person. That’s probably because it is so often easier to care about animals than other people in general, but it probably also has quite a bit to do with the fact that we immediately recognize that the people in movies aren’t actually dying. There’s a disconnect that isn’t always there with animals, just in terms of that immediate reaction to seeing on-screen violence. We take comfort in the reassurance that “no animals were harmed in the making of this picture,” but we don’t need to say that for actors. The question of what to do about this trope, how to circumvent or even retire it, gets tossed around a lot.
The answer is honestly simple: don’t kill animals in horror movies for the sake of simple shock value. It seems obvious. Some filmmakers will always dispute that, of course. I don’t think it’s a trope that’s ever going to go away. There are more recent films like Alexandre Aja’s fantastic Crawl, which saw its pooch survive, but admittedly after several scenes of putting the dog in danger in a way that dangled the prospect of its death like a carrot. It’s hard to say what exactly is the best way to sidestep this tired cliché, but there’s one film I think absolutely had the right idea, and that’s 1996’s Bad Moon.
Among genre fans, Bad Moon seems to have a reputation for being, well, fine. It has one of the best werewolf designs ever committed to film, but it doesn’t tend to get much credit beyond that, and that’s a mistake because, as silly as it often is, it has a terrific solution to the fear of endangered dogs in horror: outright making the dog the protagonist of the entire story. I don’t mean, “if you watch it from this perspective, it’s really the dog that’s the hero.” No, the dog, Thor, is the literal hero of the film, and every single human is a supporting character in a narrative that fundamentally belongs to him. That’s not an accident, either. Written and directed by Eric Red, Bad Moon is based on the novel Thor by Wayne Smith. A truly wild read, Thor is almost entirely told from the perspective of the dog.
In Bad Moon, a man named Ted (Michael Paré) returns from the jungle having recently become a werewolf, and he moves in with his sister, Janet (Mariel Hemingway) and her son (Mason Gamble). Their dog, Thor, immediately distrusts him, recognizing that he poses a threat to his family. Boiled down to its most basic premise, Bad Moon is essentially Fright Night, but if Charley were a dog. The two have massive differences, naturally, but the parallels are there: Charley knows that his next-door neighbor is a vampire but he cannot convince anyone else, because nobody believes that vampires exist. Thor knows that the man who has moved into a trailer in the backyard is a werewolf, but he cannot convince anyone because they are people and he is a dog. Every single hurdle in the plot, every obstacle, every challenge is something that Thor has to overcome because his family is absolutely oblivious to the danger in their midst. Much like Jerry’s rivalry with Charley in Fright Night, Ted the Werewolf’s only rivalry is with Thor, because he recognizes at once that Thor is the only one who knows how dangerous he actually is. What follows from there is an absolutely joyous and, against all odds, genuinely compelling game of cat-and-mouse between Michael Paré and a German Shepard.
It’s not even a joke, either. Paré’s Uncle Ted notices that Thor is uneasy around him from the first. He not-so-subtly remarks that the dog “knows a predator when he sees one.” At first, he barely seems to mind the dog, knowing that there’s not much Thor can do to interfere with Ted’s carnivorous lunar activities, as he’s just an animal. That begins to shift almost immediately, as Ted realizes that Thor isn’t going to back down. One of the best and strangest scenes of the entire film sees Thor sitting outside Ted’s trailer as Ted is about to go for his “late night jog” – in reality, chaining himself to a tree in the woods, which he will undoubtedly break free from to embark on another deadly werewolf rampage. Ted is afraid to leave the trailer, because he knows Thor will bark and bring attention to what he’s doing. He stays in the trailer and waits Thor out, and that’s not even halfway through the movie. That scene colors everything Ted does for the rest of the feature, especially convincing Janet that the dog is dangerous and should be sent to the pound, because it establishes that Ted fears Thor.
If anything, that might make Thor better than most of even the best horror movie heroes. Jerry Dandridge is far more annoyed with Charley than he is actually afraid, even right up until the end. Freddy’s never afraid of Nancy until she rigs her house into a maze of booby traps against him. But it’s not that far into Bad Moon before it’s made clear that Ted is afraid of Thor, that he does not want to risk confrontation with the dog, not only because it would potentially out him to his family, but mostly because he – a giant werewolf – is afraid he might lose. And he does. As the plot unfolds, it’s not like Thor is written as a person in a dog’s body, as is certainly a risk when the animal becomes a central character. Thor might have an arc, and he has characterization, but he’s definitely a pooch through and through – as evidenced by the fact that the first thing he does to let Ted know he means business is to pee on his trailer.
That’s what is ultimately so fascinating about Bad Moon. It shouldn’t work, because the concept is so absurd. The entire narrative rests on the shoulders of this dog, and the fact that it actually does work is truly a testament not only to the direction and especially the editing, but above all to what has to be one of the finest animal performances in cinematic history by Primo the German Shepard. Thor cannot communicate what he’s feeling to the family he is trying to protect, to his people, but the audience always knows exactly what he’s thinking, and that’s key. That’s what makes the whole thing work, and it’s so hard to pull off. Even Homeward Bound needed celebrity voices to make sure the audience understood that its animals were lost and trying to go home.
The very concept of Bad Moon speaks to – and is a clever twist on – what appears to be a universally accepted virtue of dogs: that they can always tell when there’s something off about someone. That’s certainly the case here, but the problem is that Paré’s Uncle Ted isn’t so easily dismissed because he’s family. Which also, to a smaller degree, highlights how often we don’t want to see underlying problems with those we call family. We want to remember them as the people they were or, more accurately, the people we always thought or wanted them to be. That’s the arc embodied by Hemingway’s Janet. It’s well into the movie before she starts to see that there’s anything truly wrong with her brother, and even then she understandably starts to speculate that he is a serial killer, not a werewolf.
Of course, Thor’s well-being is frequently threatened throughout Bad Moon. To the outside eye, all of Thor’s behavior looks like that of an increasingly violent animal, which makes it easy for Ted to claim that the dog is dangerous and should be sent to the pound. Thor is even hilariously blamed for the werewolf killings, which involve mutilated bodies, decapitations, severed limbs – all, in general, things a German Shepard very clearly could not do. Thor gets briefly sent to the pound, Thor gets his furry ass handed to him in his fight against Werewolf Ted, but the thing is, more than probably any other animal in horror, I don’t think we’re too often meant to really question if Thor is going to make it out alive. There’s some small speculation, sure, but not like the dog in Crawl, where we’re waiting for it to happen and breathe a sigh of relief when it doesn’t. Sure, protagonists in horror sometimes die, and even though that’s become more and more accepted, it’s still more the exception than the rule.
To once more correlate Bad Moon with Fright Night: we know that people are going to get killed by vampires in that movie. Of course we do. We never really think that Charley is going to be one of them, because he’s the hero. Sure, it’s a possibility, because this is horror and rules are made to be broken. But it’s less of a possibility than almost any other scenario. So why don’t we see more animals get this kind of treatment in horror? Why don’t we see more dogs, cats, iguanas, good boys and good girls as the heroes of the piece? We’ll probably always wonder about the safety of animals in horror thanks to decades of having those fears confirmed. But we’ll worry about that a little less if it’s the animal who’s sniffing out the threat, defending their people and ultimately facing down and defeating the monster on their own. It seems a no-brainer, because audiences might not always identify with the protagonist of a film, but they are invested in every dog that trots across their screen. I’m not saying every horror movie needs a pooch as its hero, but come on, let’s have a few more at least, as a treat.
