Why do dogs often die in horror movies?

It’s spooky season––the time of year where we’re most likely to sit down for a scary movie or two. But, as dog people, we have all likely noticed that the mortality rate for dogs in these types of films are quite high. 

Think about it. How many times have you sat in a dark room with friends to watch a horror movie, only to have a camera pan over to reveal a dog and someone in the room goes: “Oh, no!” because they know what fate most likely awaits them.

Dog deaths in films are predictable. In fact, there’s an entire website dedicated to knowing in advance exactly when a dog dies in film, television, and books. But in horror movies, particularly, the demise of the adorable family pet has become a predictable trope. 

But there are reasons filmmakers continue this trend with each new blockbuster release. And, in the month of tricks and frivolity, it’s fun to speculate about how this has become such an establishment of the genre.

Dogs are characters, dogs aren’t people

At AGDT, we talk a lot about dogs as individual, sentient beings. While Hollywood recognizes the importance of dogs to their audience, they don’t make the leap to giving dogs their own personhood within these films. 

A human being represented in film is a character in that film, but they also stand in for something very recognizable and real to us, the audience: a human with sentient personhood.

Dogs are characters in horror films. They have names. They have personalities. They have similarities to dogs in our lives that are evocative. But when we watch humans navigate their way through conflict, we empathize with them. We understand their emotional drive, and we can imagine ourselves in their position. 

This isn’t possible with animals. Dogs aren’t haunted by the ghost of their spouses, they aren’t sober and on the brink of relapse, they aren’t fighting recognizable mental illness. Simply put, dogs aren’t humans. And filmmakers know it. 

But they are characters who have already made us feel something outside the boundaries of the story, and films capitalize on their character identity within the story, while outright ignoring their identities as sentient individuals because it mimics a human death, without fully committing to killing a principal character before it’s narratively justified.

Dogs are simply easier to kill off in a script than a person. They aren’t humans, they aren’t driving the story, we can’t fully experience what they’re feeling. But because of our relationship to dogs, their deaths have a similar impact on us. 

Films use this to their advantage––leaving us to feel the momentary loss of a character, with no fictional human life yet spared. 

Dogs help us track the escalation of horror

Horror films start out like any other movie. A family driving in a car filled with boxes on their way to a new home, for example. If we haven’t seen the trailer and know nothing about the plot ahead, it’s possible we won’t even know it’s a horror film until the first door opens on its own or something goes bump in the night.

Many dogs die in Act I of a film, or by the midpoint at the latest. This isn’t a coincidence. After the realization of horror, writers need a way to externalize the danger within the film. Sometimes, this comes in the form of something burning, or an ominous warning from a creepy shopkeeper. And sometimes, it comes in the form of a family waking up to find their beloved dog inexplicably dead in the backyard. 

It’s important to mention that there is usually a build to this structure, and often filmmakers utilize dramatic irony to help us, the audience, realize something is wrong before any humans in the film. 

For example, the camera may cut to an empty hall where a dog is growling at the steps to the basement. Or they anxiously pace the perimeter of a yard and alert bark into the woods. Or something supernatural slowly withers away at them day after day until finally––they die. 

This build is significant because this typically happens before any human is harmed, or even before the characters realize anything is wrong. Again, the dog in this hypothetical film is being treated as a character. We follow the escalation of danger and learn the rules of the fictional world through their eyes, and we begin to slowly recognize the danger these humans have stumbled into through the dog’s death.

A writer might choose to develop a script like this for many reasons. Primarily, it has to do with escalation. A screenwriter needs the audience to understand that there are legitimate stakes in this story, and they need to build to this slowly. If they jump straight to human-focused danger within the first act of the film, they have fewer choices to continue escalating the horror of the film. 

Once the dog dies, it’s customary for the characters to finally realize something is wrong. By structuring a film like this, filmmakers inadvertently create a hierarchical structure of horror, wherein humans are fully fleshed out protagonists, and dogs expendable and inherently less narratively valuable.  

What if the dog makes it?

Storytelling is a form of manipulation. We are being given a set of circumstances that are designed to conjure emotion and keep us intrigued enough to sit through a movie until the end. 

This is still true even if a dog lives through everything filmmakers set against them. We are often being led to feel something specific that helps us understand the theme of the film. If, after the dog rushed into the woods to evade the monster only to show up on the doorstep at the end of the film, the movie is trying to tell us more about why we’ve just watched it. 

And, of course, there’s always the possibility that the team just wanted to see a happy ending for the dog.