Good Boy By Ben Leonberg '15 and Alex Cannon '17 Set for Theatrical Release
Good Boy is set to open in theaters on Friday, October 3, 2025. The horror movie, shot from the perspective of a dog, is making its way to theaters after a massively successful festival run. Many Columbia filmmakers have helped carry this movie to success including Ben Leonberg '15, Alex Cannon '17, Scott Riehs '15, Undergraduate Film student Arielle Friedman, Adjunct Assistant Professor Michael Cacioppo Belantara, Director of Motion Picture and Information Technology Peter Vaughan, and Jeff Sousa '10.
Good Boy tells the story of a dog named Indy who must defend his human from dark forces while inside of a haunted house. Leonberg directed and co-produced Good Boy on top of co-writing the script with Cannon. In an interview with Daily Dead the collaborators talked about the thrill of taking the piece to the festival screen.
Cannon shared, “We’ve been cooking this thing up for four plus years, and to finally get to see it in a room where you can feel other people react to it is a joy. We've made movies in the past, both comedies and horror, and it's fun because, in both types of movies, you get to see a reaction in the room. We think the movie's good. That's why we made it, but when you see it with a big crowd in a room, you can see that the scare actually does work.”
The ingenuity of the film presented one of its most interesting challenges: filming a horror movie starring a dog. Indy was played by the director’s own retriever (talk about a ne-pup-sism hire!). In an interview with Variety Leonberg explained that directing a dog often required “creating a set of circumstances where he will react in a way that is going to look like a performance. A classic example is the scene where he looks in the corner early in the movie before the darkness has grown, and we see an empty corner, and he does a classic dog head tilt.
“For that, I just gave him a command he didn’t know. So he’s been following my instructions: ‘Here, sit, stay, neon sign!’ And then he’s just like, ‘What does that mean?’ When you take out my talking on set, which is profoundly unscary, and replace it with all the amazing sound design and music, the shot of a dog reacting to that strange empty corner, it looks like a performance.”
Friedman starred as Vera in the film, while Riehs worked as second unit assistant director, Cacioppo Belantara and Vaughan served as post production supervisors, and Sousa worked as the colorist. Other screenings of the film, which premiered at South by Southwest in 2025, include Overlook Film Festival, Melbourne International Film Festival, Film at Lincoln Center, Calgary Underground Film Festival, and many more. After a positive reception to the trailer posted on social media, IFC made the decision to change the film’s theatrical release from limited to wide.
See a trailer for the film below.