Editorials
[It Came From the ‘80s] Bringing Stephen King’s Rabid ‘Cujo’ to Life
Leave it to Stephen King to take otherwise benign things like a Plymouth Fury or loveable Saint Bernard and turn them into objects of unrelenting terror. When you think of the word monster, you usually picture something much more frightening and supernatural, but in the ‘80s (and the hands of King) anything could be a monster. Including a rabid dog.
The setup is simple; the Camber family dog gets bitten by a rabid bat while chasing a rabbit one day. Joe Camber happens to be the Trenton family’s car mechanic, and their Ford Pinto is on the fritz. The Pinto is the least of the Trenton’s concerns, though, as wife Donna (Dee Wallace) has been having an affair with a former high school sweetheart. It adds further stress to her husband Vic (Daniel Hugh-Helly), who’s dealing with severe pressures with work. Naturally, their young son Tad (Danny Pintauro) is caught in the middle. All of that pales in comparison to the horror of Donna having to fight for her and her son’s life when the Pinto strands them at the Cambers’ place with their homicidal, rabid beast of a dog while Vic is away on business.
While Cujo as we know it is filled with suspense and anguish, we very nearly received a drastically different take. Director Peter Medak (The Changeling), along with his Changeling screenwriter Barbara Turner, sought to hone in on the supernatural elements from King’s novel. In the novel, young Tad is plagued by nightmarish visions of a monster in his closet long before he encounters Cujo. Turner’s script focused on that part, and would’ve had the ghostly apparition possess Cujo. Two days into filming, though, well into an elaborate shoot with complicated angles, producer Dan Blatt’s patience wore thin and he fired Medak along with D.P. Tony Richmond. King recommended director Lewis Teague, having been impressed with his previous film Alligator. Then the subsequent co-screenwriter, Don Carlos Dunaway, cut out anything pertaining to the supernatural. Between this move and Medak’s termination, Turner became so infuriated she insisted her credit on the film be a pseudonym.
Teague’s experience on Alligator, in which he had to shoot around a 26-foot long rubber alligator that didn’t work as it was supposed to as well as real alligators on miniature sets, meant he was well suited to working with not so cooperative animal-based movie monsters. For Cujo, he used a variety of techniques. There were six actual Saint Bernards, each one trained to handle a specific task. Some lunged, some barked on command, and some simply ran for a distance. They’re not an easy breed to train, and dog trainer Karl Miller initially tried to persuade Teague to go with an alternate breed. Despite the menacing nature of Cujo, many of these dogs couldn’t stop wagging their tails (and had to be strapped down as a result). But Teague’s direction means you luckily don’t notice this much on screen unless you’re looking for it specifically.
There were also mechanical Saint Bernards, and mechanical dog heads – created by special visual effects makeup artist Peter Knowlton – to handle the more dangerous stuff like the shots that had Cujo ramming his head into the car. And of course, stunt man Gary Morgan also doubled for Cujo in certain scenes. Teague even had a backup dog suit for a Labrador, but it ultimately went unneeded.
Teague wasn’t done working with animals in horror, either; his follow up film to Cujo was Stephen King anthology Cat’s Eye. From alligators, to dogs, to cats, Teague might be the reigning champ of animal horror of the ‘80s. As for Cujo, his decision to scrap the supernatural might ruffle the feathers of die-hard Constant Readers, but it made the Trenton family’s fight for survival much more harrowing in its realness. Donna and Tad have to contend with one nasty Saint Benard (wagging tails and all), dehydration, and heat stroke.
Despite what the higher-ups at Marvel would have you believe, Stan Lee’s original vision for Spider-Man was very different from the friendly neighborhood wall-crawler that fans ultimately got.
It was comics maestro Steve Ditko that turned him into the lovable web-head that we all know and love, though even that first draft of the character wasn’t exactly meant to be a child-friendly mascot. Ditko envisioned an uncanny arachnid-human hybrid whose freakish poses and dark costume would strike terror into the hearts of criminals, with the inclusion of web-shooters possibly having been a suggestion by Ditko’s roommate at the time, renowned fetish artist and bondage enthusiast Eric Stanton.
These more adult-oriented origins may have changed over the years, but one could argue that Spidey never completely lost his darker side. In fact, we’d eventually see several grim storylines that explored the horrific consequences of Spider-Man’s radioactive blood. While having his irradiated body fluids give Mary Jane cancer is likely the most terrifying of these yarns (track down Spider-Man: Reign if you’re up for a depressing read that was at one point set to be adapted to film by Michael Jackson), one of the most memorable horror-adjacent moments in these comics has to be the acceleration of Peter Parker’s mutation and the eventual introduction of Man-Spider – a storyline that appears to have been one of the main inspirations behind the upcoming Spider-Man: Brand New Day.
I sincerely doubt that Marvel Studios is really going to give their toy-selling juggernaut a Cronenbergian rebrand, but the most recent trailer for Brand New Day suggests that the creative team is pulling from some surprisingly spooky source material in this latest superhero sequel. Specifically, the trailer makes it seem like the film is set to be a loose adaptation of the Neogenic Nightmare arc from Spider-Man: The Animated Series, commonly known as the best exploration of Spidey’s radioactive dark side that also features the most iconic version of Man-Spider.
If you’re wondering what these influences could mean for the upcoming film, I’d like to invite you to join me as we look back on some of the animated series’ most horror-tinged episodes.
A fourteen-episode story arc that made up the show’s second season, Neogenic Nightmare began airing in September of 1995. At this point, the series had already earned a reputation as the definitive version of Spider-Man despite dealing with absurd levels of censorship and executive meddling. It’s widely known at this point that this incarnation of Spidey was prohibited from ever punching his villains, and the studio even insisted that realistic guns should be replaced with futuristic laser weapons in order to avoid enraging concerned parents.
And that’s not even mentioning bizarre demands like setting up Hobgoblin as the original Goblin villain simply because the folks responsible for the toy-line had already prepared the character’s merchandise before scripts were even written.
At the end of the day. the show’s success mostly came down to John Semper’s excellent writing, with the (mostly) faithful recreation of the Spider-Man’s core principals and a handful of iconic storylines (coupled with an excellent cast behind the scenes) elevating a what was intended to be a kid’s show promoting ToyBiz products.
Naturally, the rampant cartoon censorship of the 90s couldn’t keep Semper from wanting to explore darker themes from his own favorite Spider-Man comics, and that’s how his team came up with a season-long re-imagining of iconic arcs like the Six-Arm Saga, The Mutant Agenda and even the first appearance of the Sinister Six. These stories would be enhanced with additional “dark” characters like Blade, The Punisher and even Morbius (though the latter had to exchange his vampiric blood-drinking for bizarre plasma-absorbing powers in order to conform to network guidelines).
If you haven’t yet seen it, the complete Neogenic Nightmare arc follows Spider-Man as he discovers that his mutation is progressing beyond his initial superpowers and threatening to turn him into a more monstrous hybrid. After developing extra arms, Spidey goes so far as to request help from both the X-Men and several other super-heroes as he becomes embroiled in a criminal conspiracy involving a team-up between some of his most iconic villains. The arc eventually introduces us to the show’s version of Man-Spider, which is depicted here as the monstrous final stage of the process which began when Peter was first bitten by that radioactive spider.
Personally, I think this werewolf-like addition to Spidey’s genetic curse is the best incarnation of Man-Spider that we’ve ever seen. This is because the six-armed body horror of it all adds even more weight to Peter’s decision to keep helping others regardless of what his powers may cost him, with the creature’s final rampage even giving the supporting cast a chance to help Spider-Man for a change. While I don’t hate the Morbius movie as much as some other comic fans, it’s a shame that Sony relegated that story to a solo film instead of later incorporating it into the Man-Spider saga like Neogenic Nightmare did.
Season two of the animated series ended up being an even bigger hit than the first, with fans loving the show’s take on an expanded Marvel Universe (which even included the ’90s X-Men cast) as well as the darker take on a more monstrous Spider-Man. That’s why it makes sense that the MCU’s return to street-level comic adventures would harken back to this particular storyline – especially since it appears that the Disney wishes to use the upcoming film as an opportunity to shine a light on other Marvel characters just like Semper did back in the day.
From what we can see in the trailer, Tom Holland’s Spider-Man appears to be going through his own additional transformations, including creepy fully black eyes and organic web-shooter, as well as the cocoon-building behavior previously seen in Marvel’s The Other arc in the comics. As I mentioned before, I doubt that the MCU will allow this particular cash cow to fully transform into a nightmarish spider freak that can scare away children, but there’s always a chance that the studio could surprise us with more horror elements. I’d also love to see the story explore Spidey’s mutation and use that as an excuse to formally introduce X-Men’s mutants into the MCU, especially since Sadie Sink is rumored to be playing Jean Grey in the flick.
However, even if Brand New Day doesn’t adapt as much of the Neogenic Nightmare as the promotional material has suggested, I’d argue that this particular season of Spider-Man: The Animated Series is still worth revisiting simply because it’s a great example of artists being able to work past network limitations in order to tell complex stories that approach full-on body-horror.
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