I’ll admit it right now.  I’ve never really been a dog person.

That’s the way it’s been my entire life.  According to my sisters, I was bitten by a dog when I was two years old.  Needless to say, I don’t remember that happening but that still might explain why, when I was growing up, I was scared to death of dogs.  Seriously, if I was outside and I heard a dog barking or if I saw a dog running around loose (or even on a leash), I would immediately start shaking.  It didn’t help that, for some reason, I always seemed to run into the big dogs that wanted to jump and slobber all over me.  (“Don’t be scared,” one dog owner shouted at me, “that’ll just make him more wild,” as if it was somehow my responsibility to keep his dog under control.)

Then there was that time when was I was ten and I was visiting Lake Texoma with my family.  There was another family there and they had a big black dog with them.  When I first saw him, the dog was very friendly.  He ran up to me and, tentatively and with my sisters standing beside me for moral support, I even patted his head,.  He seemed so nice!  Finally, I had met a dog that didn’t scare me.  My family was really happy.  We went down to the lake and everyone told me how proud they were that I had managed to face a dog without running away.  As we came back from the lake, I saw the dog laying down next to his family’s van.  I smiled at the sight of him.  He raised his head, looked at me, and started to growl.  He wasn’t growling at my sisters or my parents.  He was growling at me.  Terrified, I went over to my family’s car and I ducked down behind it.  I could hear my Dad telling the dog to stop and then I heard the loudest barking and saw the dog running towards me.  I jumped in the car and locked the doors.  The dog’s owners eventually grabbed their dog and took him back to their van.  They said that I probably looked like someone who had been mean to it a few weeks earlier.  One thing that they did not really do was apologize.  Instead, they just made me feel like it was somehow my fault.  They didn’t seem sympathetic when my Mom explained that I was terrified of dogs.  When they realized my Dad was on the verge of punching someone, they retreated to their van and quickly left.  At that time, I decided that 1) I would never trust another dog and that 2) dog owners are the most selfish people on the planet.  I know that sounds harsh but seriously, I was traumatized!

As I grew up, I mellowed a bit.  I met nice dog owners who actually made the effort to control their pets.  I even met some friendly dogs and slowly realized that not all of them were going to try to kill me.  I became less scared of dogs but they still definitely make me nervous.  I still cringe when listening to the barking and I still reflexively step back whenever I see a big dog anywhere near me.  Now that I know more about dogs, I have to admit that I feel a little bit guilty about not liking them more.  Knowing that dogs actually blame themselves for me not liking them is kind of heart-breaking and I have been making more of an effort to be, if nothing else, at least polite to the canines who lives in the neighborhood.  That said, I’m a cat person and I’ll always be cat person.  Cats don’t care if you like them or not nor do they blame themselves if you’re in a bad mood, which is lot less of an emotional responsibility to deal with.

1977’s Dogs is a film that seems like it was especially made to give people like me nightmares.  It’s a pretty simple movie.  At a college in Southern California, the students and the faculty find themselves under siege from a bunch of dogs that have been driven mad by pheromones being sprayed into the atmosphere by a nearby, top secret government experiment.  Two professors (David McCallum and George Wyner) attempt to convince everyone to evacuate the college and the town but, in typical Jaws fashion, no one wants to admit the truth about what’s happening.  By the end, nearly everyone is dead (and the final scene of all the dead bodies spread across campus is genuinely haunting) and the cats are starting to hiss at humans.

Dogs is a low-budget drive-in flick but it’s still a frightening film, largely because the dogs are relentless and the victims may be largely stupid but they’re all stupid in realistic ways.  A group of college students is told to wait inside until George Wyner comes back for them but Wyner takes so long in returning that the terrified students decide to make a run for it themselves.  It doesn’t end well but it’s the sort of thing that I can actually imagine happening.  No one likes being told to wait and, with no idea of what’s actually going on, making a run for it might actually seem like as good an idea as any.  Even when the movie recreates the Psycho shower scene (with dogs instead of Norman Bates), it’s far more effective than it perhaps has any right to be.

Would this film be as effective from the point of view of someone who doesn’t have a history of being scared of dogs?  It’s a legitimate question.  Dogs aren’t like sharks.  Most people like dogs.  But when they’re barking and growling and determined to bite your throat, they can be pretty scary!  I’ll just say that Dogs is a film that seemed to be uniquely designed to give me nightmares.