It’s a trope of supernatural horror that pets will notice the unwelcome presence in the family home before their owners do — so why has the genre never taken full advantage of this trope to tell a story from this unique perspective? The 1996 film “Bad Moon,” a now-forgotten flop both critically and commercially, was a story about a man’s transformation into a werewolf told from his pet pooch’s POV, although director Eric Red didn’t do anything meaningful with the conceit to make this anything more than a gimmick. Dogs are known as man’s best friend, after all, so grounding a ghost story in the emotional bond between pet and owner has long felt like low-hanging fruit for a director to take advantage of, not just briefly touch upon in a throwaway scene.

Ben Leonberg’s directorial debut “Good Boy,” shot over the course of several years, is the best-case scenario for a pet’s-eye view horror, telling a story about a dog’s love for (and unwavering need to protect) his owner that just happens to also feature a supernatural threat. The fact Leonberg made the movie with his own beloved retriever Indy helps elevate this perspective far above a novelty stunt, the kind of which we see on the genre festival circuit year-in, year-out. Instead, he builds on the thematic potential of brief moments in a movie like “Poltergeist,” making an old-fashioned ghost story feel brand new when shifted to an animal perspective unfamiliar with decades of horror tropes.

We rarely see Todd, Indy’s owner, from the waist up, but thanks to the simple trick of casting himself as the character’s body double — actor Shane Jensen’s voice was dubbed over in post-production — Ben Leonberg manages to articulate the central relationship in an effectively underplayed manner, lived-in enough that we can still see the inherent bond during a period the owner is growing increasingly antagonistic. Before moving to a rural family home several relatives died in, shrugging off any concern that the house is haunted, Todd receives a cancer diagnosis, known to the audience but rendered incomprehensible to our four-legged protagonist. It’s one of the few moments in which Leonberg keeps Indy present for the exposition happening around him; a smart recurring gag is having him wander off, distracted, whenever the humans around him start speaking about the cursed house he’s moved into. The “why” of the haunting is far less important than how he navigates it, and in the story of a loyal hound who lives to protect his owner, the threat doesn’t need to be explained for Indy to know he must counter it.

The most effective moments arrive long before we catch our first glimpses of what’s haunting the cabin, Leonberg recontextualizing Todd’s drastic shift in behavior after getting bad news as pure horror through his dog’s eyes — we understand why he’d grow distressed and despondent, but Indy has no concept of it. Sequences where he disappears all day, presumably to drown his sorrows, are treated as harbingers of doom, Indy’s distraught face looking out of the window waiting for his return the most powerful image of them all. That the writer/director can still build tension at the mundane — for example framing Todd’s late arrival home as a nightmare through the eyes of a pet who knows something is wrong but can’t understand what — is perhaps the most Spielbergian aspect of a movie that owes its fair share of debt to “Poltergeist,” (outside of a protagonist named Indy, that is) even if this similarly unassuming haunting has been relocated from the unremarkable middle-American suburbs back to the archetypal horror movie cabin in the woods.

At a slender 71 minutes including credits, there’s very little meat on the bones when it comes to developing supernatural lore, but the pet perspective makes this an irrelevance. No dog would have encountered the concept of a ghost until faced with one, and as they can’t look too far up from the ground, the vast majority of threats are inferred rather than fully depicted, only sparingly visualized in the moments it would make sense for them to creep into frame. It’s simultaneously a fully realized take on the pet-POV conceit, and an ingenious indie filmmaking trick, in the later stages allowing Shane Jensen’s voice as he talks to his pet add the dramatic weight to mostly unseen horrors. We understand the tropes, but encountering them second hand through fresh eyes makes them feel newly surreal all over again.

So far, the discourse — and extensive marketing campaign! — surrounding “Good Boy” has been about the morality of killing animal characters in movies; for some reason, audiences will always be happier to accept unrelenting violence toward humans, but not even peaceful deaths for their canine companions, due to their love of dogs as movie heroes. This should be an irrelevant factor toward Ben Leonberg’s film, which instead mines pathos by inverting the inherent tragedy of the pet-owner relationship. One of the reasons children are bought pets is so that they can grapple with the concept of mortality for the first time when growing up with a companion who ages faster than they do, but that dynamic is rarely reversed because it’s near impossible to articulate from an authentic animal perspective without anthropomorphizing the creature in question.

And yes, it’s undeniable that Indy didn’t grasp the grave nature of the material he was given and perhaps wasn’t even aware that he was being recorded. But over the course of several years, Leonberg captured enough footage of his beloved pet to build an emotional arc that feels authentic, purely through Indy’s gestures alone. It may have been a long filming process for the sake of finding the right takes that could manipulate an audience’s feelings, the director effectively projecting his own anxieties about mortality onto his dog, but it never comes across as cheap or exploitative. It feels genuine, even if the central performer had no idea he was being filmed, or that his movements would communicate a much larger existential sentiment.

Pet owners will likely be moved to tears by “Good Boy,” but not for the reasons they’re afraid of. Transcending its gimmick status within its opening stretch and only growing more resonant from there, it becomes that rare horror film you could recommend to people who hate the genre — the set pieces are well constructed, but their impact pales next to a haunting, moving story about a dog and his owner. 

“Good Boy” premieres in theaters on October 3.