Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on October 3, 2007, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Lewis Teague’s Cujo was the first of a wave of films in the early ’80s that firmly established “Stephen King movies” as a genre unto themselves. Over a nine-month period starting with Cujo’s release in mid-August 1983, five horror features based on the author’s work were released across the U.S., and perhaps it was the fact that Cujo came first that helped it squeak to the top of the group’s box-office standings, just ahead of David Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone and John Carpenter’s Christine. It helps, of course, that it’s both an effective fright film and a very faithful, if necessarily condensed, adaptation of King’s novel.
As is pointed out by King biographer Douglas E. Winter in the documentary on Lionsgate’s long-necessary special-edition DVD, Cujo was the author’s darkest book to date when it was published in 1981, eschewing the supernatural and paranormal threats of his previous novels for a more down-to-earth and realistic brand of terror. (It would be eclipsed on the disturb-o-meter by King’s Pet Sematary a few years later; apparently, domestic animals brought out his especially ruthless side.) Part of the tension in both the book and film is purely human: married heroine Donna Trenton has been sleeping with handyman Steve Kemp on the side, and ends the affair just as her husband Vic finds out about it—and just before he leaves on a business trip, and Donna becomes stranded in her broken-down car with young son Tad at a remote garage. The domestic stress, however, is nothing compared to the external threat Donna faces: the garage owner’s St. Bernard, Cujo, who has become rabid from a bat bite and is now a slobbering canine monster who besieges the increasingly desperate mother and child in their immobilized vehicle.
Cujo is one of those films that may be modest in scale, but impresses the more one thinks about it, because pretty much everything about it works. The screenplay by Don Carlos Dunaway and Lauren Currier admirably distills King’s narrative down to its essentials while preserving its vital and interesting details (the “Monster Words,” Red Razberry Zingers and the Sharp Cereal Professor, etc.). Teague’s direction is taut and to-the-point, and his use of misdirection in Cujo’s first attack results in one of the all-time great leap-out-of-your-seat moments. Just as King maintains sympathy for his adulterous heroine in his prose, so does star Dee Wallace as the screen Donna, with able support by Daniel Hugh-Kelly (in his big-screen debut) as Vic, Christopher Stone (whom Wallace would later marry) as Steve and the remarkable 6-year-old Danny Pintauro, conveying sheer upsetting terror as Tad (and who, we’re reassured in the disc supplements, remained untraumatized by the filming experience).
Teague receives strong assist from Jan De Bont’s atmospheric cinematography and the evocative music by A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Charles Bernstein (one of the ’80s’ underrated horror scores). The visuals are shown off to fine effect in the DVD’s 1.85:1 transfer, and while the audio is only Dolby Digital 2.0, it’s very clear and nicely balanced. Somewhat more uneven are the two major extras, the best of which is easily the three-part, 45-minute Dog Days: The Making of Cujo documentary by specialist of the form Laurent Bouzereau. Compiling interviews with Teague, producers Daniel H. Blatt and Robert Singer, De Bont, Bernstein, editor Neil Travis, Winter and the lead cast (minus the late Stone, who is eulogized toward the end), it explores the movie’s creation from start to finish.
Teague, who recalls coming onto the production with two days’ prep after the previous director was fired (his predecessor isn’t named, but we’ll tell you it was Peter Medak), goes into detail regarding a few of the most notable scenes, including that big jump and an overhead shot utilizing an elongated set. We also learn about the development of the screenplay, that the initial editor was let go as well (we can’t help you with his name) and that a Naval fogger, used to hide battleships at sea, was used to mist up one location for a particularly creepy scene…and also attracted the attention of the local fire department. Needless to say, a lengthy section is devoted to the titular four-legged villain, who was played by an assortment of real St. Bernards—amusingly, no one can agree on how many there were—plus puppet heads, a man in a dog outfit and even a similarly costumed Labrador Retriever (whose shots never made it into the film)!
There’s a lot of solid info here—and unfortunately, quite a lot of it is repeated by Teague in his audio commentary. The director, who maintains that this is his favorite of his films, does share several unique tidbits—among them a much more explicit love scene between Donna and Steve that was filmed and then deleted (nope, it’s not on the disc) in the interest of keeping the audience on her side, and the fact that because Cujo was financed by Salt Lake City-based Taft Entertainment, a number of the crew were Mormons. But too much of it covers ground dealt with in the documentary, to the exclusion of any in-depth discussion of subjects like the colorful supporting cast (including Ed Lauter and Mills Watson) and the theatrical ad campaign, which did its best to hide the fact that the movie’s central threat is a dog, despite its being based on King’s widely read novel. At one point, Teague even repeats an anecdote he told on his commentary for the previous Alligator disc.
Both Teague and Winter point out that when King first wrote his own Cujo script, he made numerous changes to the story—including a more upbeat ending, which was preserved in the eventual feature. Other than that change, Cujo stands as proof that it is indeed possible to take a 300-plus-page book and craft a 90-minute feature from it without losing any of its essential qualities in the process.
