20 Hit Horror Movies NOBODY Saw Coming

Ben Leonberg's Good Boy is a film that, by any conventional metric, should've failed to make much of an impression at all at the box office, given that it's a micro-budget $70,000 horror film with a dog for a protagonist, an incredibly minimalist storytelling approach, a 73-minute runtime, and a distributor with a weak theatrical track record.

Few would've blinked if it ended up going straight to streaming, but Leonberg managed to leverage strong festival reviews and viral buzz surrounding the film's adorable canine hero, Indy, to deliver a stonking box office success.

Ultimately Good Boy grossed $8.8 million, which while chump change compared to some of the hits on this list, is a massive 125-times the film's paltry budget.

Better still, it was subsequently acquired by Shudder for its streaming release, and has since launched Leonberg's wider filmmaking career, with him already being signed to direct two more horror movies, Follow Mode and Ankle Snatcher.