The historic and expanding role of dogs in the horror genre

A short chronicle of man's best friend in horror books, movies, and videogames.

Indy as Himself - Courtesy of Shudder

The horror genre has more than its fair share of tropes that have garnered popularity and notoriety for the genre. From evil children to final girls, we’ve become quite familiarized. It’s for this reason we continue to see a steady stream of Scream sequels. But one trope still tugs at our heart strings despite a prolonged history in the genre—dogs. 

Our canine companions have terrorized us as a rabid St. Bernard in Cujo and an adorable alien mimic in The Thing. They’ve greeted our screens as an emotional survival companion in I Am Legend, consciences to a humorous antihero in The Voices, and recently as the main protagonist in Good Boy.

But the presence of dogs serves more than just filling in the role of antagonist or companion. Our emotional reactions to these on-screen animals and what we see them go through complements the psychological investments in horror that we already experience.

One such emotion is the sympathy towards their helplessness and innocence. While dogs can have significant roles on screen, they can often be inconsequential and unfortunate victims.  

In Halloween, Lindsey Wallace’s German Shephard Lester is strangled to death by Michael Myers after continuously barking at him. In American Psycho, Patrick Bateman brutally stomps to death the dog belonging to a lone homeless man named Al (whom he just stabbed to death) for the same reason. What makes it sadder is how Bateman stomped him more out of annoyance than self-preservation.  

The origins

Dogs have been featured in horror movies since the 1920s silent film adaptations of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Der Hund Von Baskerville (The Hound of Baskervilles), which centered on murders of a prominent family supposedly carried out by a large supernatural hell hound.

While dogs in horror have an origin of over a hundred years, their significance in the genre was not solidified until over fifty years ago with the beginning of a franchise that was not horror, but horror adjacent. 

Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! premiered in September 1969. It was created by Joe Ruby and Ken Spears after the success of The Archie Show, which featured a sheep dog named Hot Dog. Both The Archie Show and Scooby-Doo were conceptualized from the landscape of superhero-dominated Saturday morning cartoons. After some groups of parents began complaining about the violence in those shows, network executives wanted more family-friendly content. 

To distance Scooby from any similarities to Hot Dog, the creators came up with the concept of a large, but cowardly, Great Dane. He and his human friends (originally conceived as a “hippy music group”) would travel around solving mysteries as Mystery Inc. The Mysteries Five was the original name of both the show and the group.  

The show only ran for two seasons, but it launched a major media franchise consisting of numerous live-action and animated spin-offs and adaptations. In nearly all iterations, it features Scooby and his pals encountering real monsters or people disguised as monsters (usually the latter).

All grown up 

The Amityville Horror, written by Jay Anson, came out in 1977. It follows the Lutz family who move into the same house in which a man murdered his family. They bring along their Golden Retriever Harry, who is the first to alert the characters of something sinister by constantly barking at the basement walls. A popular film adaptation was released in 1979.

Stephen King released Cujo in 1981, and its film adaptation came out two years later. Both concerned a St. Bernard who terrorizes a woman and her child after being infected with Rabies. Though evil dogs had been a popular topic in the paperback horror market in the 1970s, Cujo was a hit on many bestsellers' lists.

By the time Amityville came out, many of the kids who grew up watching Scooby’s antics with his friends had grown up. The lovable, hungry Great Dane that the readers and viewers loved in the 1960s was no longer the most prominent dog to associate with monsters and horror. Now there were other dogs being victimized by actual demons and escaped asylum patients or attacking women and their children in New England townships.  

Throughout the 1980s, dogs would continue to appear in horror as both companions and foes.

In John Carpenter’s The Thing, the Norwegian sled dog being pursued by the helicopter in the beginning is a disguise of a metamorphosing alien. The husky in Demons 2, Davie, licks up demon blood and gets taken over by one, attacking his owner. 

Dogs continued to hold sweeter roles in horror, however. These were usually as sidekicks to their human counterparts who often gave early warning to danger. 

Poltergeist saw the Freeling family at the mercy of unrested spirits who captured their youngest daughter, Carole Anne. E. Buzz, their Golden Retriever, barks at the wall before fetching a ball without any verbal command. He also senses Carole Anne’s presence from the other side first.

Nanook, the Alaskan Malamute from The Lost Boys had a direct role with the protagonists, biting half-vampire Michael’s hand when he attempted to touch Sam, and even pushing vampiric Paul into a bathtub full of holy water and garlic. 

There was a steady trend throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s of dogs in horror as either companions or villains. While the Scooby-Doo franchise continued to produce installments, we had largely forgotten the cowardly canine’s affiliation with the genre until another terrified pooch came along. 

Courage the Cowardly Dog premiered on Cartoon Network in 1999 and ran until 2002. The show featured an anthropomorphic pink dog (his breed is never mentioned, but he was based off the creator’s Beagle) named Courage who resides with his elderly married owners on a desolate farm in the town of Nowhere, Kansas. He routinely faced supernatural and monstrous threats and was ultimately the only one to defend his family and home. 

The show maintains a popular legacy for its combination of surreal humor and unsettling horror. While not as big of a franchise as Scooby-Doo, the show acted as something of a generational replacement of the latter. The kids who grew up watching Cujo and The Amityville Horror were now grown up with their own children watching a new show featuring a terrified dog. However, unlike Scooby’s adventures, Courage’s were always involved in real and often supernatural dangers.

In this respect, the new generation had their own new cowardly pooch to live vicariously through. To project the same innocence and fear we project onto unfortunate fictional dogs like Lester in Halloween. Both shows dealt with scared dogs against terror, but Courage’s ordeals were filled with terror he endured at the audience's amusement (and unease). But that amusement also came with a projection of the terrors and fears. The new generation watched a cowardly canine face his fears in a way that, despite the surrealism, children could understand.

During the run of the show, the second and third installments of the popular videogame series Resident Evil were released. Both games, as well as their predecessor, featured a zombified Doberman enemy (named Cerberus, after Hades’ mythical hound). Months before the finale of Courage aired, the live-action adaptation of the first game came out, which featured trained Dobermans in heavy makeup playing their videogame counterparts. 

The early 2000s saw a new generation of kids watching scared dogs face evil, while playing videogames in which they face evil dogs. 

A New Generation

2026 is less than three months old, and we have a new generation of children with what may be a new generation of dogs in the horror genre. 

Good Boy was released on streaming in October 2025. It was directed and co-written by Ben Leonberg and features his Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever Indy playing himself. The story is told entirely through Indy’s perspective—the first horror film to do so. It follows Indy as he moves with his owner Todd to a haunted house left for Todd by his deceased grandfather. Indy, as expected, is the first to notice a supernatural presence in the house. 

The film drew heavily from that trope and was a hit with critics and audiences alike. So much so that Indy won the Best Performance in a Horror or Thriller at the 9th Annual Astra Film Awards. 

Throughout horror history, we’ve feared and befriended dogs. But through Indy we’ve been the dog. In addition to watching our canine friends bark at the unseen danger, we can now say we've barked with them.  

We may continue to bark with them, as Leonberg has already discussed a potential sequel, and Good Boy could signal the next generation’s association (and inspiration) of dogs in horror. But one thing guaranteed is that they will continue to bark at us both in life and on the screen: at the villain, at the hero, or as the hero.