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 canines. Stretching far 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 WWII’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. Beware of the dog—or as one seminal film warned, “They’re not pets anymore.”

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.

Brian Patrick Duggan
Format: softcover (7 x 10)
Pages:
Bibliographic Info: ca. 55 photos, appendix, glossary, notes, bibliography, index
Copyright Date: 2023
pISBN: 978-1-4766-8587-8
eISBN: 978-1-4766-4948-1
Imprint: McFarland
Series: Dogs in Our World

“Brian Duggan’s Horror Dogs is, quite honestly, a marvel. Dense with detail, it is infused with humor and a light touch. Duggan has taken an unlikely subject, and, through a ferocious combination of scholarly obsession and deft writing, turned it into that rarest of breeds: a book which teaches you things you didn’t know you wanted to learn.”—Alexandra Horowitz, author of Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know and The Year of the Puppy: How Dogs Become Themselves