Description
How did beloved movie dogs become man-killers like Cujo and his cinematic pack-mates? For the first time, here is the fascinating history of canines in horror movies and why our best friends were (and are still) painted as malevolent. Stretching back into Classical mythology, treacherous hounds are found only sporadically in art and literature until the appearance of cinema's first horror dog, Sherlock Holmes' Hound of the Baskervilles. The story intensifies through World War II's K-9 Corps to the 1970s animal horror films, which broke social taboos about the "good dog" on screen and deliberately vilified certain breeds--sometimes even fluffy lapdogs.
With behind-the-scenes insights from writers, directors, actors, and dog trainers, here are the flickering hounds of silent films through talkies and Technicolor, to the latest computer-generated brutes--the supernatural, rabid, laboratory-made, alien, feral, and trained killers. "Cave Canem (Beware the Dog)"--or as one seminal film warned, "They're not pets anymore."
Author: Brian Patrick Duggan
Publisher: McFarland & Company
Published: 08/07/2023
Pages: 274
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.23lbs
Size: 9.92h x 6.93w x 0.71d
ISBN13: 9781476685878
ISBN10: 1476685878
BISAC Categories:
- Performing Arts | Film | Genres | Horror
About the Author
Brian Patrick Duggan is the author of Saluki: The Desert Hound and the English Travelers Who Brought It to the West, and numerous articles on canine history which have been published in AKC Family Dog, AKC Gazette, Greasy Grass: The Journal of the Custer Battlefield Historical & Museum Association and Research Review: The Journal of the Little Big Horn Associates, among others. He is a retired university technology educator, an active American Kennel Club judge, and the editor for McFarland's Dogs in Our World series.