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.
Having grown up in a religious family, Christian movie night was something that happened a lot more often than I care to admit. However, back when I was a teenager, my parents showed up one night with an unusually cool-looking DVD of a movie that had been recommended to them by a church leader. Curious to see what new kind of evangelical propaganda my parents had rented this time, I proceeded to watch the film with them expecting a heavy-handed snoozefest.
To my surprise, I was a few minutes in when Denzel Washington proceeded to dismember a band of cannibal raiders when I realized that this was in fact a real movie. My mom was horrified by the flick’s extreme violence and dark subject matter, but I instantly became a fan of the Hughes Brothers’ faith-based 2010 thriller, The Book of Eli. And with the film’s atomic apocalypse having apparently taken place in 2024, I think this is the perfect time to dive into why this grim parable might also be entertaining for horror fans.
Originally penned by gaming journalist and The Walking Dead: The Game co-writer Gary Whitta, the spec script for The Book of Eli was already making waves back in 2007 when it appeared on the coveted Blacklist. It wasn’t long before Columbia and Warner Bros. snatched up the rights to the project, hiring From Hell directors Albert and Allen Hughes while also garnering attention from industry heavyweights like Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman.
After a series of revisions by Anthony Peckham meant to make the story more consumer-friendly, the picture was finally released in January of 2010, with the finished film following Denzel as a mysterious wanderer making his way across a post-apocalyptic America while protecting a sacred book. Along the way, he encounters a run-down settlement controlled by Bill Carnegie (Gary Oldman), a man desperate to get his hands on Eli’s book so he can motivate his underlings to expand his empire. Unwilling to let this power fall into the wrong hands, Eli embarks on a dangerous journey that will test the limits of his faith.
SO WHY IS IT WORTH WATCHING?
Judging by the film’s box-office success, mainstream audiences appear to have enjoyed the Hughes’ bleak vision of a future where everything went wrong, but critics were left divided by the flick’s trope-heavy narrative and unapologetic religious elements. And while I’ll be the first to admit that The Book of Eli isn’t particularly subtle or original, I appreciate the film’s earnest execution of familiar ideas.
For starters, I’d like to address the religious elephant in the room, as I understand the hesitation that some folks (myself included) might have about watching something that sounds like Christian propaganda. Faith does indeed play a huge part in the narrative here, but I’d argue that the film is more about the power of stories than a specific religion. The entire point of Oldman’s character is that he needs a unifying narrative that he can take advantage of in order to manipulate others, while Eli ultimately chooses to deliver his gift to a community of scholars. In fact, the movie even makes a point of placing the Bible in between equally culturally important books like the Torah and Quran, which I think is pretty poignant for a flick inspired by exploitation cinema.
Sure, the film has its fair share of logical inconsistencies (ranging from the extent of Eli’s Daredevil superpowers to his impossibly small Braille Bible), but I think the film more than makes up for these nitpicks with a genuine passion for classic post-apocalyptic cinema. Several critics accused the film of being a knockoff of superior productions, but I’d argue that both Whitta and the Hughes knowingly crafted a loving pastiche of genre influences like Mad Max and A Boy and His Dog.
Lastly, it’s no surprise that the cast here absolutely kicks ass. Denzel plays the title role of a stoic badass perfectly (going so far as to train with Bruce Lee’s protégée in order to perform his own stunts) while Oldman effortlessly assumes a surprisingly subdued yet incredibly intimidating persona. Even Mila Kunis is remarkably charming here, though I wish the script had taken the time to develop these secondary characters a little further. And hey, did I mention that Tom Waits is in this?
AND WHAT MAKES IT HORROR ADJACENT?
Denzel’s very first interaction with another human being in this movie results in a gory fight scene culminating in a face-off against a masked brute wielding a chainsaw (which he presumably uses to butcher travelers before eating them), so I think it’s safe to say that this dog-eat-dog vision of America will likely appeal to horror fans.
From diseased cannibals to hyper-violent motorcycle gangs roaming the wasteland, there’s plenty of disturbing R-rated material here – which is even more impressive when you remember that this story revolves around the bible. And while there are a few too many references to sexual assault for my taste, even if it does make sense in-universe, the flick does a great job of immersing you in this post-nuclear nightmare.
The excessively depressing color palette and obvious green screen effects may take some viewers out of the experience, but the beat-up and lived-in sets and costume design do their best to bring this dead world to life – which might just be the scariest part of the experience.
Ultimately, I believe your enjoyment of The Book of Eli will largely depend on how willing you are to overlook some ham-fisted biblical references in order to enjoy some brutal post-apocalyptic shenanigans. And while I can’t really blame folks who’d rather not deal with that, I think it would be a shame to miss out on a genuinely engaging thrill-ride because of one minor detail.
With that in mind, I’m incredibly curious to see what Whitta and the Hughes Brothers have planned for the upcoming prequel series starring John Boyega…
There’s no understating the importance of a balanced media diet, and since bloody and disgusting entertainment isn’t exclusive to the horror genre, we’ve come up with Horror Adjacent – a recurring column where we recommend non-horror movies that horror fans might enjoy.
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