Before I say one word (well, okay, after these few words), if you are a horror fan worth any street cred, you need to read this book, savor it, dog-ear and highlight it. Brian Patrick Duggan is a passionate and experienced author with his subject matter, and McFarland has published a winner with his monumental work, Horror Dogs: Man’s Best Friend as Movie Monster. Even if you only have a significant horror movie hound in your life, then here is the perfect gift to give for the holiday season.

Exhaustively researched and foot-noted, Duggan gives a comprehensive history of canine terror as found in horror cinema. He goes even farther by providing context and historical focus, examining the social, mythological, and literary evolution from man’s best friend to man’s worst nightmare on four legs. For the horror fan, his in-depth commentary on productions (dog-handling and sounds, production issues, breed of dog chosen and why) is illuminating, while also providing a long list of movies, from across the years, that old and new horror fans may find worthwhile to explore.

His chosen structure for the book breaks it all down into two parts. Part 1: Genesis gives a chronologically and detailed outline of the just-a-cute dog’s transformation to the definitely-no-longer-a-pet dogs found in the horror films of the 1970s. Here is where he explains how a forty-cent copy of The Hound of the Baskervilles began his life-long love of dogs and how their innocence and companionship slowly change into one of stalking terror. From the first appearance of a dog in Edison’s Athlete with a Wand (1894), to their use in comedies, to the bestial hound as portrayed in the many cinematic iterations of The Hound of the Baskervilles, which removed the comedy and replaced it with a bestial terror. It is also in this section that he looks back at the ‘Horrible Antecedents’ in myth, art, and literature, from corpse-eating dogs to slave-tracking bloodhounds, to dogs attacking humans. Through Bulls-Eye, the dog to be feared in Oliver Twist, and other examples, he shows how the Western world’s canine perspective shifted from innocuous family pet to vicious predator.

Along the way, he notes how the breed of dog changes in cinema with the perception of how dangerous they can be, and how the animal attack films, “coinciding with the Vietnam War and Watergate,” created the horror subgenre called nature gone wild or eco horror, beginning with Willard (1971). As Duggan states, “it was inevitable that one screenwriter would twist domestic dogs into dangerous predators;” and so the first human-attacking Doberman on screen shows up in The Kennel Murder Case (1933). What follows are a slew of horror-centric dog movies that Duggan goes into the nitty-gritty on.

In Part II: Taxonomy: A Field Guide to Horror Dogs, the supernatural, Frankenstein (cyborg, robotic) , alien, insurrection, and trained to kill dogs are examined with their respective movies, including The Mephisto Waltz (1971), the evil Rottweiler in Daughters of Satan (1972) and The Omen (1976), and the ghost dog in Topper Takes a Trip (1939). Rabid dogs are also covered in the Cujo (1983) chapter, where he makes the case that Cujo supplanted the hound of the Baskervilles as the go to popular culture example of a terrifying dog. The first alien dog is seen in the 1950s alien invasion movies with The Beast with a Million Eyes (1955), a low budget Roger Corman entry that had no beast with a million real eyes (just a poorly designed puppet, which mercifully, for the viewer, was shown briefly). Another movie where an alien controls a dog is one of my guilty-pleasure favorites, The Brain from Planet Arous (1957). Duggan then moves from mind-control to physically altered dogs with Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) and The Thing (1982).

From one dog as singular threat to packs of dogs terrifying many people is examined in the Insurrection chapter. Like Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (), even dogs can go bestial and pack up to hunt humans, as shown in movies like Dogs (1976) and The Pack (1977). He sums up in his chapter on Trained to Kill that “surprisingly, this chapter…claims the most titles, and provides a listing of world titles, with some already covered in the previous chapters.

A glossary, an appendix of productions by year, country, and breed, and his extensive chapter notes tidy up his references. (Note that the Kindle version, which I used for this review, puts the chapter notes at the end of each chapter instead of at the end of the book.)

As a final note, if you are a Sherlock Holmes fan (like me), the complete coverage on all of The Hound of the Baskervilles films–and yes, there are quite a lot of them–is alone worth the price of admission to his wonderfully insightful and informative reference. But a warning! You will never again look at your dog with the same sense of security and comfort after reading this book.