Horror Dogs: Mans Best Friend as Movie Monster Duggan Brian Patrick

How did beloved movie dogs become man-killers like Cujo and his cinematic pack-mates? 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. 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.

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, 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.