Streamin’ King: The Bloody Barnyard Centerpiece Of ‘Cujo’ Retains Its Power To Terrify

Welcome to Streamin’ King, a series grave-digging through the myriad Stephen King adaptations available on your favorite streaming services. This time we’re watching Cujo, the 1983 adaptation of the ’81 novel.

STREAMIN’ KING: CUJO

THE GIST: Lovable, gargantuan Saint Bernard contracts rabies from a bat’s bite on the nose. Cujo’s decline into indiscriminate murderousness is slobbery and swift. A woman whose husband has just discovered her affair tries taking her Ford Pinto, with her young son, to get fixed at Cujo’s owner’s house in the middle of nowhere. Nobody’s there, car dies, very bad boy attacks, and a violent, multi-day standoff ensues.

PEDIGREE: Dee Wallace (E.T., The Hills Have Eyes) gives a starring performance King felt deserved an Oscar nomination. She’s done lots of horror since and in 2017, at age 67, took the lead in Australia’s Red Christmas. After playing little Tad, Danny Pintauro spent eight years as Jonathan on every single episode of Who’s the Boss?

Directed by Lewis Teague (The Jewel of the Nile), recommended by King on the merits of 1980’s Alligator. Teague followed Cujo with the SK-written Cat’s Eye, becoming the first director to double-dip in the author’s IP pool. That film wryly opened with a cat being chased by a slavering Cujo lookalike:

The most notable screenplay in the careers of both Don Carlos Dunaway and Barbara Turner (2012’s Hemingway & Gellhorn), writing as Lauren Currier.

WORTH WATCHING FOR CONSTANT READERS? Depends, potentially not. You lose Cujo’s heartbreaking point-of-view (“He had tried to do all the things his MAN and his WOMAN, and most of all his BOY, had asked or expected of him”) as well as the fascinating stuff about the ghost of The Dead Zone serial killer Frank Dodd, and with it, all supernatural traces. But the harrowing 45-minute translation of the book’s second half is adapted so effectively you could easily gnaw half your fingernails off without even realizing. If you’ve recently read the novel and need a tonic for one of King’s most gutting endings, this version will help.

Weak attempt at a Maine setting though, and Dee Wallace tragically has to carry all the humanity that’s spread among a full cast of characters in the overpopulated-despite-its-brevity book. (They’re all here, but for the most part pointlessly, and thinly drawn.)

WORTH WATCHING FOR KING NEWBIES/AGNOSTICS? If it’s on your list of ’80s horror flicks and you need to tick that box, alright, the second half probably won’t let you down. The kid is sensational, there’s pretty colors throughout and a fair-to-good score (way too close to Jaws in the parts most like Jaws), but these get neutralized by so many tedious scenes and cardboard characters. Stay away if you’re queasy about older (and newer) movies whose claims that “no animals were harmed” feel sketchy.

You’re really fine watching the first three minutes, then skipping to the 37-minute mark, giving you exactly enough setup for the bloody barnyard centerpiece. The Cujo vs. Pinto stuff is one-of-a-kind; this is the (half-)film you watch if you want to see a dog nearly demolish a car with humans inside—realistically terrified and exhausted ones. Cujo’s main attack on Donna, Tad’s agonizing decline, a child’s mortality so viciously dangled in front of us—that stuff’s good.

11 STEPHEN KING TIES, REFERENCES, AND MISCELLANY:

1. A four-month span in ’83 brought three SK movies with freakishly similar box office hauls: Cujo ($21.1 million), The Dead Zone ($20.8 million), and Christine ($21 million).
2. Danny Pintauro made his debut here as a 6-year-old; The Shining features 6-year-old Danny Lloyd’s debut. Tad’s “monster words” in Cujo also echo Danny Torrance’s instructions for making the Overlook’s ghosts disappear.
3. Cujo‘s first two pages rehash The Dead Zone and align its monster—a suicidal serial killer—with this new, furry one in a playful, open-to-interpret manner. “Once upon a time, not so long ago,” the quite beautiful opening goes, “a monster came to the small town of Castle Rock.” Though he wasn’t a “werewolf, vampire, ghoul, or unnameable creature from the enchanted forest or from the snowy wastes,” he was a monster. “The monster was gone, the monster was dead. … Except that the monster never dies. Werewolf, vampire, ghoul, unnameable creature from the wastes. The monster never dies. It came to Castle Rock again in the summer of 1980.”
4. Joe Camber actor Ed Lauter went on to star in King’s 1991 original miniseries Golden Years.
5. Director Peter Medak (The Changeling) had supernatural, Hitchcockian ambitions for Cujo and was fired a few days into production. In the 2017 making-of book Nope, Nothing Wrong Here (the cereal spokesman’s goofy catchphrase) Medak said Barbara Turner penned an “excellent” script because King’s original “was not very good.” (He was still a rookie screenwriter.) Turner and Medak would make the monster in Tad’s closet a dead “killer with no remorse” whose ghost entered the rabid bat that bit Cujo, “so there was a plot that was following it through.” (Basically the Frank Dodd material.)

   Subsequent co-screenwriter Don Carlos Dunaway said in the same book his greatest contribution was slashing the “explicit ooga-booga” bits because “if you have a perfectly set up rational explanation for the bad stuff…the supernatural stuff is redundant and distracting.” The changes and Medak’s firing led Turner to pull her name and slap on a pseudonym. “She was so angry about that because she was so proud of her work on the film, and her writing was just perfect,” Medak said.

6. The big dog in King’s life these days is his Welsh corgi Molly, alias the Thing of Evil. (His family has such a historic love for the breed he once talked to the Nerdette podcast solely to talk about it.) He tweets about her all the time.

7. In May 2018, SK shared a short story for free on his website. It’s called “Laurie” and has been described as “puppy and old man bond after tragedy.”
8. In addition to becoming synonymous with “scary dog” (or sometimes just…a dog), Cujo has been mentioned copiously in works like The Dark Half, Pet Sematary, The Tommyknockers, the Dark Tower movie. In Needful Things, a trip to Joe Camber’s place quickly refreshes us on the horrors that once occurred there before yielding a new jewel: “Suddenly she seemed to hear a low, purring growl from the deep shadows of the barn, as if the rabid Saint Bernard … were still here, back from the dead and meaner than ever.”
9. Though The Dead Zone was the first novel to feature Castle Rock, Cujo narrowly beat it to become the first movie set in King’s fictional town. This meant Sheriff George Bannerman died onscreen in Cujo, then his Dead Zone analog Sheriff Walt Bannerman (Tom Skerritt) back on the beat two months later. Subsequent Rock-set stories onscreen include The Dark Half, Needful Things, and the eponymous Hulu anthology series, which referenced Cujo a bunch in its 2018 debut.

10. Some specious and upsetting remake news arrived in 2015, breathlessly reported by a variety of sources as simply “C.U.J.O., aka ‘Canine Unit Joint Operations,’ is a movie that is happening!” Every name in a press release from one Sunn Classic Pictures (please just go look at their site) was a string that, if pulled, unraveled the reality of this ever getting made. Dee Wallace told a blog, “If they think they can do half the job that we did with Cujo and the dogs, real dogs and the kid who was amazing…yeah, go ahead. Make an asshole out of yourself, go ahead!”

    Fortunately King bought back the rights to Cujo and a number of other properties (including Children of the Corn), effective September 2018. Bye, C.U.J.O.

11. SK’s drug and alcohol use was so severe in the early ’80s that Cujo in particular he can “barely remember writing at all.” In 2000’s On Writing he went on: “I like that book. I wish I could remember enjoying the good parts as I put them down on the page.” Recently The Onion ran this little homage: “Nation Admits Being So Coked-Out In ’80s They Have No Memory Of Reading Cujo.”

CRITICAL CONSENSUS: So-so, and amusing to trawl. The Washington Post speculated that King’s “powers of invention may be suffering as he sustains a relentless rate of productivity.” The Globe and Mail‘s critic tripped over himself: “Is it possible for a horror movie to be too good? If it is, then Cujo is it: this is one of the few films on record where the combination of low shock and high style results in an experience that borders on the unbearably intense.”

The Twilight Zone magazine decried that the “evasive PR campaign … never so much as hints that Cujo is about a dog.” Time Out London observed that “for all its ingenuity, Cujo does lose an awful lot of ground from the fact that rabid St. Bernards tend to evoke pity rather than terror.” Janet Maslin was so meh for the New York Times that this is a sentence: “And Danny Pintauro does a good job as the frightened child.” A…good…job.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT FOR CUJO (1981): After a rare one-book year in 1980, King launched into a decade of unparalleled productivity with three in ’81: Roadwork (as Richard Bachman), the horror cinema meditation Danse Macabre, then this lil guy. The next year brought another Castle Rock story in the Different Seasons novella “The Body” (which, of course, was eventually turned into the motion picture Stand By Me).

NEXT TIME ON STREAMIN’ KING: 1983’s The Dead Zone, David Cronenberg’s Christopher Walken-starring adaptation of the ’79 novel.

Zach Dionne is a North Carolina writer whose first King book was Cujo at 11; he was too young.

Where to stream Cujo