Mummy, Why is that Man Pretending to be a Dog?

Horror Moments, Opera Edition

‘Horror Moments’ is a weekly series examining horror-inflected scenes and themes in unexpected places. The ‘moments’ are published weekly on Thursdays, and I share articles on the history of magic, theatre, storytelling, and more on Mondays. Catch up with the recent Kate Bush series here and the full back catalogue of horror moments (from Wallace & Gromit to Shakespeare) here. Don’t forget to subscribe!

The man in the dog suit whines outside the door.

“Again?” sighs my mother.

“Where’s my gun?” says my dad.

“We’ll take care of it this time,” my older brothers say.

Thus begins ‘Dog Days,’ an extremely unsettling story by Judy Budnitz published in The Paris Review in 1995. In today’s ‘horror moment’ we dive into the operatic adaptation and compare it to a disturbing little sub genre of horror films where human beings inexplicably dress up like beasts.

Prototype Festival, NYU Skirball Center, New York. Photograph: James Matthew Daniel.

An American Dystopia

‘Dog Days’ centres around a young girl whose family is trying to survive a dystopian hellscape without reliable sources of food and warmth. She imagines the politicians in Washington hoarding it all, the leaders vaguely responsible for whatever has happened. This is an American nigthmare, a fable about what might happen when the ‘number one’ country is number one no more. Her recollections of her best friend Marjorie, long gone, are all she has by way of friendship. Even the animals have left the city.

The girl’s mother seems happy to go along with the dog-man’s delusion when he arrives at their door, and even our protagonist is lulled into petting and talking to him, giving him the name ‘Prince.’ She seems to trust that ‘Prince’ will never hurt her, even as the men of her own family become increasingly desperate and frustrated. As their collective hunger worsens, the question of whether Prince is human or animal becomes dangerously significant.

What better story for composer David T. Little and librettist Royce Varvek to turn into an opera?

Dog-Men and Modern Opera

Little has called ‘Dog Days’ a ‘very twenty first century opera’ and apart from the setting and themes, it was a piece designed to embrace technology and amplification. Performers at the 2012 premiere wore mics, for example, and some moments were livestreamed and projected — a trick that has become a gimmick on the West End of late. One aria was hummed by the singer while words were projected onto a screen. In general, it’s a lot easier to understand than many operas, and not just because its libretto is in English. The music doesn’t overwhelm the words, you can really hear the text .

That we can follow the plot and the psychological nuances of the piece helps with the horror elements which are present in even the tenderest scenes. I really don’t like (in a good way) the sight of the man/dog creeping in behind the girl as the music mimics a nursery rhyme…

Yet the dog brings out a kind of honesty in everyone who interacts with him: “you’re a good listener dog man, crazy probably but you listen.” His ambigous humanity also amplifies the beastliness in human beings. In this he resembles another man/dog of opera, Sharik or Sharikov from the extremely upsetting ‘A Dog’s Heart’ (2010) by composer Alexander Raskatov. Based on a satire by Mikhail Bulgakov, this is an Island of Dr Moreau-style story about a doctor who implants human organs into a dog and makes him semi-human. In this story, the resulting creation exhibits the worst of both worlds and must be turned back again. The horror here is most pronounced in the nightmarish surgical sequences. Well worth a watch, though not for the faint of (human) heart.

‘Dog Days’ proved disturbing for audiences not just because of the far greater mystery surrounding its central canine figure, but because the circumstance of the plot were oddly close to home. Little shares an anecdote about an audience member who apologised at the interval for having to leave because the story was ‘too real’ and reminded her of war-torn Europe where her family had eaten grass to survive (the family in the opera eats dandelions).

You never do find out who the man was, and why he decided to start behaving like a dog. That he is a product of trauma, personal and societal, is all that seems certain.

Dog Costumes in Horror

There are a surprising number of horror films that have explored how unsettling it is when a person dresses up as an animal alter ego. Two years after ‘Dog Days’ premiered the found footage Creep (2014) gave us an antagonist who occasionally dresses up as a wolf. The story follows a videographer who has been hired to travel to a remote house and create a memorial video for Alex, a man dying of cancer, so that his unborn son can watch it one day.

But there is something off about Alex and things are made far worse when we are introduced to ‘Peachfuzz,’ his wolf mask which allows him to unleash his real self. When Alex is ‘Peachfuzz’ he doesn’t behave like a literal wolf, but he is wolfish in a narrative sense like the villain of Little Red Riding Hood, civilised but sinister, playful yet predatory. It’s somehow so much more unnerving than an out and out werewolf transformation.

You know who else found themselves in an isolated place with a person inexplicably dressed as an animal? Poor Wendy Torrance, of course, in The Shining (1980) stranded in The Overlook Hotel with her son and her increasingly threatening husband, Jack.

Ever since he took the job as winter caretaker for the empty hotel, Jack’s sanity has been slipping away. He has been seeing and speaking with figures from the building’s chequered history, which might be ghosts or might be projections of his mind. He meets the previous caretaker who massacred his family and now urges Jack to ‘correct’ his own.

So Wendy is stumbling through the haunted corridors, fearful for her life, and it is at this point that she glimpses two men in a bedroom, seemingly engaged in a sex act, and one of them is dressed as an animal.

It is never referenced again in the film and never explained. We’ve caught a glimpse of something we shouldn’t have seen for several reasons, an incomprehensible tableau where the animal costume (which leaves the man’s bottom bare) is evidently sexual. Being haunted is bad enough, but haunted by a furry?

In Stephen King’s book, a man referred to as ‘Roger the Dog Man’ had attended a ball at the Overlook back in 1945 dressed as a dog for the hotel’s owner Horace Derwent. He had been in love with Derwent and had worn the costume as a sign of submission. In the film it looks more like a bear than a dog, a change that some have suggested is part of Kubrick’s wider use of teddy bear imagery to suggest that Jack has been abusing his son. Whatever your interpretation of the scene, it is undeniable that the sight of a grown man dressed as an animal is central to making this moment as nightmarish as possible.

Then there’s Norweigan language horror film Good Boy (2023) where a woman’s new and seemingly-perfect relationship is shaken by the revelation that her boyfriend’s ‘dog’ is in fact one of his friends in a dog costume. The tension ramps up as she struggles to accept the explanation that this is a form of therapy for the friend’s traumatic past. It seems increasingly to be an act of darkest manipulation.

“It’s very important that you treat him like a dog. Do not treat him like a human. Okay?”

In all of these depictions, dog-men encapsulate fears about the loss of humanity through trauma or manipulation. Many seem entwined with a latent threat of sexual violence, in fact ‘Prince’ from Dog Days is made even more mysterious by the relative absence of a sexual motivation, either submissive or aggressive. It is the other men in the story who threaten the female protagonist whilst he seems content to live gently and faithfully as her companion in return for food and shelter. We end the opera with no real answer for his descent into doghood and the ultimate tragedy lies in what human beings are capable of doing to a person so abject in their vulnerability. Violence and death are commonplace in opera, but it’s rare to see such a complex and uncanny form of horror.

Next week, we find out what happens when the horrors of childhood are given operatic proportions. Until then, happy nightmares everyone!

Horror moments are posted every Thursday and a wide variety of articles exploring the history of magic, theatre, storytelling, and more are published on Mondays.

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