Hack or Slash - A Horror Movie Review Podcast · Hack or Slash

Good Boy (2025)

January 9, 2026·1 hr 8 min·5 clips

A filmmaker spent 400 days making a horror movie from a dog's perspective

Ben Leonberg’s feature directorial debut starts from a familiar horror thought: in haunted house stories, the dog is usually the first one to know something is off. That idea became *Good Boy*, a supernatural story told almost entirely from a dog’s point of view. The film follows a loyal dog and his owner as they move into a rural home that quickly stops feeling safe. As an unseen presence moves closer, the dog becomes the only real protection his human has. Indy, Leonberg’s Nova Scotia duck tolling retriever, plays the lead and appears in every scene. He had no formal training and no double. Production stretched across more than 400 shooting days over three years inside a New Jersey home. The team worked with a budget of roughly $70,000. Low-angle camera work and carefully built sequences keep the film grounded in the dog’s perspective. That unusual setup does a lot of the heavy lifting here. The conversation treats the premise as more than a gimmick and keeps coming back to how the point of view changes the emotional stakes. The hosts respond to the film as both a horror exercise and a deeply emotional piece of storytelling. They talk about the movie’s beauty as a film, including the cinematography and lighting. They also focus on how much tension the perspective adds, since the audience is stuck inside the dog’s awareness. The mood stays playful at times, but the episode keeps circling back to the ache underneath the premise. One host is especially open about avoiding the movie at first because of how hard it might land. That hesitation becomes part of the discussion instead of a roadblock. The show notes that the film is not brutal or violent in an explicit way, but it is deeply emotional. The ending is treated as something more than a standard payoff. Instead of release, it leaves behind a strong sense of earned distress. The hosts also make room for personal reactions and family associations that the film brought up. That grounding gives the review a more intimate shape than a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down. The episode keeps moving with the show’s usual mix of banter, analysis, and blunt reactions. It ends up treating *Good Boy* as a beautiful, tense, and very hard-to-shake horror film.

As heard by us

A dog-centered horror discussion that stays sharp, tense, and quietly affecting.

The episode treats Good Boy as a supernatural story seen almost entirely through a dog's eyes, and that choice drives the whole conversation. It comes back again and again to the film's familiar haunted-house setup, then shows how the horror lands harder once Indy is the first…

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Why you'd press play

You want a supernatural horror review told almost entirely from a dog's point of view.

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