Cujo the novel has one of Stephen King’s most bleak endings (spoiler alert: everyone dies!) so it’s no surprise that screenplay writers Don Carlos Dunaway and Lauren Currier tweaked the ending. They hoped for a more crowd-pleasing finish, with Donna Trenton (Dee Wallace) and her son Tad (Danny Pintauro) surviving the rabid dog-monster of nightmares.
As we researched black dogs, Cujo, and bats, we became curious about rabies. Is Cujo’s behavior depicted realistically? Have rabid dogs killed humans? And is rabies a real threat in modern America or anywhere else in the world? According to the World Health Organization (WHO), rabies is a preventable disease that still kills humans in over 150 countries. Ninety-five percent of these deaths occur in Africa and Asia:
Rabies is one of the neglected tropical diseases that predominantly affects poor and vulnerable populations who live in remote rural locations. Although effective human vaccines and immunoglobulins exist for rabies, they are not readily available or accessible to those in need. Globally, rabies deaths are rarely reported and children between the ages of five to fourteen years are frequent victims. Treating a rabies exposure, where the average cost of rabies post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) is US $40 in Africa, and US $49 in Asia, can be a catastrophic financial burden on affected families whose average daily income is around US $1–2 per person.7
While rabies is not a threat in the modernized world, children in third-world regions seem to be the most at risk. A shocking statistic from WHO purports that the overwhelming majority of human rabies infections come from dogs: 95 percent. This makes sense, as dogs live more closely to humans than most other species, and also lends credence to the believability of Cujo.
Rabies inflames the brain of the victim, whether animal or human, and once symptoms are present there is little hope of survival. It first presents as a rather general sickness, with nausea, fever, and sore throat. As the disease spreads throughout the brain, it will eventually cause seizures, paralysis, and coma. One symptom of rabies would be familiar to fans of Cujo. Rabies has been proven to cause aggressive and irrational behavior. This is depicted in Cujo’s sudden personality change as he quickly changes from lovable pup to vicious killer.
There are rare instances of rabies killing people in the UK and the US. Omar Zouhri died in 2018 at John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, England, after being bitten by a rabid cat during a vacation to Morocco. When he complained to his doctor of hand paralysis, the first rabies test came back negative. Unfortunately, by the time the doctors at Radcliffe realized it was rabies, it was too late for Mr. Zouhri. Before this, the last recorded rabies death in the UK had occurred in 2012 once again after the victim came home from a vacation, this time in Asia, where he’d been bitten by a dog. A similar tragedy happened in the United States in 2017. The Centers for Disease Control outlined the death of a sixty-five-year-old woman who vacationed in India. While there she was bitten by an aggressive puppy. Six weeks later, back at home in Virginia, the woman complained of pain and tingling in her right arm. In a few days the woman had insomnia, trouble swallowing water, and intense pain. She was diagnosed with having anxiety. Alex Berezow from the American Council of Science and Health described the deterioration of her body:
The patient’s condition worsened, and she was taken by ambulance to a different hospital. Now, she was displaying a lack of coordination, which often indicates some sort of neurological problem. Doctors had reason to believe she was suffering from a blockage in a heart blood vessel, so she underwent an emergency catheterization (i.e., doctors stuck a tube in her heart). They found nothing abnormal. By that night, the patient was agitated, combative, and gasping for air when trying to drink water. That’s when the medical team learned from her husband that she had been bitten by a dog in India.8
She died after many life-saving measures, including the “Milwaukee Protocol” which is an experimental treatment in which the patient is put into a coma and given ketamine, ribavirin, and amantadine. This mix of drugs were chosen to attack the inflammation in the victim’s central nervous system. Since its first use in 2004, the Milwaukee Protocol has been tried twenty-six times, being successful only once. The single person saved by this treatment, a fifteen-year-old girl, left the hospital after seventy-six days and went on to attend college.
Rabies is a rare way to die in the modern age, yet it is not unheard of. The WHO is working to eradicate rabies deaths from the globe, hoping to meet this goal by 2030. The likelihood that an American dog would suffer from rabies is slim to none, but Cujo’s aggression seems realistic in both the book and the film. And so, the palatable fear of rabies, of its ability to kill so swiftly and painfully, remains.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
ARACHNOPHOBIA
Year of Release: 1990
Director: Frank Marshall
Writer: Don Jakoby, Wesley Strick
Starring: Jeff Daniels, Julian Sands
Budget: $22 million
Box Office: $53.2 million
Spiders are scary. Their spindly legs, tiny fangs, and bulbous group of eyes terrify. It’s quite nearly a fact, as they have long been derided in popular culture. For every Spider-Man there are dozens of spider-centric horror movies, think Tarantula (1955), The Giant Spider Invasion (1975), and Eight Legged Freaks (2002). According to Claire McKechnie in her study for the Journal of Victorian Culture, spiders were once observed as being associated with “ingenuity and industry”1 but as gothic literature ascended in popularity through the late Victorian age, the spider became emblematic of the dark and mysterious. “Much maligned as the unfamiliar Other, the spider caused—and mitigated—anxieties about the limits of the human.” Perhaps it is this “otherness” that is at the heart of our collective fear of spiders. In a 1991 study at the City, University of London, Graham Davey concluded that it was, indeed, their distinctly non-human differences that instill fear. “It turns out that it is not so much a fear of being bitten, but rather the seemingly erratic movements of spiders, and their ‘legginess.’ Davey said animal fears may represent a functionally distinct set of adaptive responses which have been selected for during the evolutionary history of the human species.”2 This makes sense, as the “erratic movements” of spiders, or other creatures, would have tipped off our ancestors to potential dangers. Whatever the reason, as we sift through research for this chapter, we feel as though spiders are scrambling up our spines!
“A return to the spoofy scares of the ’50s drive-in movies,”3 Arachnophobia hit theaters in July of 1990. Starring Jeff Daniels as spider-phobic Dr. Ross Jennings and John Goodman as a goofy yet determined exterminator, Arachnophobia was a Disney produced picture with a sizable budget. In an interview with the Orlando Sentinel, Daniels explained the tone they were going for. “We don’t have chainsaws going through necks and blood spurting. It’s scary, but this is not The Attack of the Killer Spiders. We approached it as a comedy with a couple of thrills. We knew we had the thrills in there, so we worked hard to make sure the movie had a sense of humor about itself.” The humor, he said, “kind of relaxes the audience, so that we can come in and get them again.”4 So don’t let the Disney name and humorous bent fool you, the spiders in Arachnophobia play upon our shared fears of spiders’ “otherness.” The film starts in the Amazonian rainforest where enormous dead spiders are literally falling from towering trees. After an entomologist dies from a spider bite his body is sent back to his hometown in America. This concept of dying from a spider bite, particularly in the Amazon, is not fiction. A small arachnid called the wandering spider is considered one of the deadliest animals in the Amazon. If disturbed by humans it will bite. “The venom of the spider causes extreme pain and inflammation, as well as loss of muscle control which might lead to respiratory paralysis and death.”5 Before an antidote was created in 1998, fourteen people were killed by the wandering spiders’ bites. In Arachnophobia, one deadly spider, much larger than the real wandering spider, is mistakenly sealed in with the corpse of the entomologist, which becomes the catalyst to spiders running amok in the sleepy, idyllic town of Canaima, California.