Cody
The earliest Stephen King movies were made by some legendary filmmakers. Brian De Palma. Tobe Hooper. Stanley Kubrick. George A. Romero. David Cronenberg. John Carpenter. But in that lineup, there was one adaptation that seemed less prestigious on the surface. It was a killer dog movie from the guy who made Alligator, and he wasn’t even the first choice to direct it. The production was rocky from the start. A director was fired after only a few days. Major script rewrites stripped out key supernatural elements. And yet, the film became popular enough to earn a permanent place in pop culture, and Stephen King even thought it was Oscar worthy. This is what happened to Cujo.
Real-Life Inspiration
The story begins in 1977, when Stephen King rolled his motorcycle up to an isolated mechanic’s shop in the Maine countryside. As he waited, the biggest Saint Bernard he had ever seen came walking out of the shop. It was growling at him. King was terrified. Stranded on a broken-down motorcycle, he had no protection and nowhere to run. Before the dog could attack, the mechanic subdued it by smacking it with a wrench. The incident stuck with King.
Around the same time, King was worrying about the Ford Pinto his wife, Tabitha, drove. The carburetor flooded. The car stalled. Sometimes it wouldn’t start at all. King imagined his wife stranded in the car while that same raging Saint Bernard tried to get to her. Then he took the idea one step further. What if it wasn’t just a mean dog? What if it was rabid?
The idea reminded him of made-for-TV thrillers of the era; a suspense story set almost entirely in one small location. He knew he had the basis for a novel.
Creating Cujo
King wrote about a housewife named Donna Trenton, who drives her unreliable Pinto to an isolated mechanic’s shop in rural Maine. Her young son, Tad, is with her. When the mechanic’s rabid Saint Bernard attacks, Donna and Tad are trapped inside the car.
King couldn’t remember the name of the Saint Bernard he encountered in real life. Was it Gonzo? Bowser? For the novel, he named the dog Cujo, borrowing the alias of a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army responsible for the kidnapping of Patty Hearst in 1974.
To expand the story, King added layers of human conflict. The mechanic became an abusive alcoholic. His wife and child were given a chance to escape him. Donna Trenton was given marital problems of her own, as she’s having an affair with the town stud. Donna’s husband is conveniently absent because he’s an ad man dealing with a crisis involving a cereal product feared to cause internal bleeding.
Writing Under the Influence
King originally wrote Cujo with standard chapter breaks, but later restructured the novel into a single, unbroken block of prose. He wanted it to feel relentless, like a brick being hurled through the reader’s window.
He remembers that much… but he was in the depths of alcohol and drug addiction when he was writing Cujo, so he barely remembers writing it at all. Somehow, that doesn’t come through in the finished novel.
The Supernatural Version
Cujo was published in 1981, and producers Daniel H. Blatt and Robert Singer quickly secured the film rights. King wrote a draft of the script and suggested that Alligator director Lewis Teague would be a good choice to take the helm. The producers scrapped his script and disregarded his suggestion, instead hiring Peter Medak, who’s best known for directing the haunted house movie The Changeling. They also brought in
Don’t Look Now cinematographer Anthony B. Richmond, a hire that Medak says he cautioned them against because Richmond was reportedly struggling with alcoholism at the time. But they moved forward, with Barbara Turner writing the screenplay.
While the threat of a rabid Saint Bernard is a very down-to-earth concept, there’s also a supernatural angle to the book. It’s implied that the situation with Cujo has some connection to a dead serial killer that used to stalk the town of Castle Rock, as seen in The Dead Zone, and the monster that Tad fears is lurking in his closet. A being that King strongly hints might be real. Turner kept those supernatural elements in her script. The bat that gives Cujo rabies was an evil entity. The opening scene even took place in a cemetery, with Cujo wandering past the serial killer’s grave.
That was one of the first scenes Medak and Richmond filmed… and one of just a few nights of filming that took place before the producers decided to fire Richmond. Since filming was already underway, Medak stood up for his cinematographer and said if they fired Richmond, he was done with Cujo
as well. At least, that’s Medak’s version of the story. Richmond says it happened the other way around; the producers wanted to fire Medak for being slow to make decisions, so he left in solidarity with the director. Whatever the case, Medak and Richmond were both fired, and the production was shut down for two weeks while their replacements were found.
Lewis Teague Takes Over
That’s when Teague was hired to direct the film, paired with cinematographer Jan de Bont, who would go on to shoot Die Hard and direct Speed. Barbara Turner was friends with Medak, so she took her name off the script, going by the pseudonym Lauren Currier. Teague brought in Don Carlos Dunaway to perform rewrites that would strip out the supernatural elements and make the script thirty pages shorter. They decided make this a straightforward “nature run amok” tragedy, and Dunaway was writing fresh pages every day to keep it that way.
Bringing Cujo to Life on Screen
Making a movie about a rabid dog presented obvious challenges. Four Saint Bernards were used to portray Cujo, with the lead dog named Big Daddy. Each dog was trained for specific actions like running, barking, or lunging. For distant shots, a Saint Bernard costume was placed over a Labrador. Stuntman Gary Morgan wore a full dog costume for scenes that were too precise or dangerous for a real animal. Special effects artist Peter Knowlton created a mechanical dog head for close-ups, including moments where Cujo rams the Pinto. The dogs’ tails were tied down with fishing wire to stop them from wagging, since they were all far too happy to be convincing as rabid killers.
To simulate rabies, Knowlton coated the dogs with Karo syrup blood and fuller’s earth. The foaming drool was made from food filler mixed with baking soda and vinegar. Antibiotic ointment supplied by a veterinarian was used to cloud their eyes.
The dogs were never endangered. The American Humane Association praised trainer Karl Miller and the production for their commitment to animal safety.
A Brutal Shoot
The human actors had a rougher time, especially Dee Wallace and seven-year-old Danny Pintauro as Donna and Tad. Cujo is on a violent rampage for a fifty-minute span of this film, and just under half the movie’s ninety minutes are taken up by his assault on the Pinto with Donna and Tad inside of it. So Wallace and Pintauro had to spend weeks filming in the cramped interior of a Ford Pinto, where the temperature would pass one hundred degrees Fahrenheit, even though it was cold outside. Wallace was drenched in real sweat for many takes, struggling with dehydration and exhaustion, which are also issues the characters have to deal with as time goes on.
To make matters worse, Tad starts to slip into shock. This is harrowing stuff, and Wallace and Pintauro both put in great, true-to-life performances that really draw the viewer into the situation. It helps that this is a real-world scenario with no supernatural edge to it. This is something that could happen, at least to some degree.
We feel for both sides in this situation, too. Cujo is a killer, but it’s not his fault. The rabies has made a good dog turn very bad. He’s infected, which adds another layer of unease to everything because if Donna or Tad are bitten by him, they could become infected as well.
Release, Reception, and Legacy
Cujo was released on August 12, 1983. Made on a budget of roughly six million dollars, it grossed about twenty-one million domestically.
Critical reception was mixed. The New York Times found it suspenseful and frightening. Variety called it dull and uneventful. Gene Siskel dismissed it as one of the dumbest excuses for a movie he’d ever seen.
Audiences felt differently. For many viewers, Cujo instantly became a killer-animal classic, and the name entered pop culture vocabulary.
Stephen King’s Praise and the Changed Ending
On the Kingcast podcast, Stephen King called Cujo “really great” and singled out Dee Wallace’s performance. “She should have been nominated for an Academy Award,” he said. “And in my opinion, she should have won it.”
King appreciated the film’s faithfulness to the novel, with one major exception: Tad’s fate. In the book, Tad dies. Wallace insisted that the film spare the child, arguing that audiences wouldn’t accept such an extreme ordeal ending in tragedy. Teague, the producers, and King agreed.
Wallace later recalled King writing to the filmmakers: “Thank God you didn’t kill the kid at the end. I’ve never gotten more hate mail for anything else I’ve done.”
A Film That Won Over Its Harshest Critic
More than forty years later, Cujo still holds up as a tense, emotionally gripping horror film. Perhaps the strongest endorsement comes from Peter Medak himself. Being fired from the project was so painful that Medak didn’t watch the finished movie for thirty-five years. When he finally did, he was surprised.
Speaking with Lee Gambin, author of the book Nope, Nothing Wrong Here: The Making of Cujo, Medak said, “I liked it. I never talked to Lewis Teague about it, but I was most impressed with the film. I thought Lewis did a fantastic job. And this is the thing: I went on for years not liking him without even knowing him, only because he was the guy who took over my movie.”
If a film can overcome negativity like that, it must be something special.
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