Samuel Fuller never made a straightforward horror film, but all evidence of his filmography insists that he should have. A number of his films demonstrate - in their stylistic looseness & devil-may-care alacrity - the lowbudget genius from which the very best horror films have egressed: a film-behavior marked by a willingness to pursue gratuity & lo-subject with an ample dosage of hi-serious-ness and sensational camera technique; in short, what is normatively termed the 'pulp' character, in a medium already transformatively 'pop'. Fuller's technique is one unafraid of making grand statements in ways that in other hands would appear ridiculous or half-witted; the successful horror director must inversely make a stand against the genre convention and produce emotions not so much of terror and grossness but of sustained delirium; fright, being as precious as it is, turns more so in an atmosphere of hysteria - the viewer held hostage and witless as to the way next - so that when the shock of terror strikes, the dam will have been left gaping wide for a torrent of batty irrationalities to stream in a controlled pyrexia - thusly the horrormeister subsumes the narrative content under the overflow of technique, through ballsy risktaking. These are qualities prominent in Fuller's spontaneity.
White Dog may be Fuller's closest flirtation with straightahead horror: the story is crude, the themes heavyhanded, the dialogue ludicrous; the shots of the white dog curling its lips as it activates its preprogrammed insensate rampage against blacks everywhere, are primitive in their species of magnetism. The 'monster' in this horror film may be ignorance, bigotry, hatred, 'racism'; but the deadon manner in which the menacing white dog is captured hearkens back to an a priori conception: the irrational beast that bares its teeth for no other purpose other than to terrify - the beast of the nightwood, the creature that exists to sink its daggerfangs into the softflesh of your foot as your bare leg dangles over the bed: the white dog in itself portends a quite blunt & undeviating menace. That the victims are blackskinned, bears only on the surface material (reason alone as to why Criterion bothered with releasing this film under its prestigious title, packaged as it is with political dimension while retaining a pulp esprit.) Aside from its horror element, White Dog can work as a social metacommentary that provided Fuller a characteristic platform from which to tackle a sensitive subject with his unapologetic brand of (controlled) sensationalism.
The story has a factual source: screenwriter/novelist Romain Gary, many years before he would shoot himself in the head in Paris, wrote a story based on the actual experience his then megastar wife, Jean Seberg, had when she brought home a large masterless dog. To her dismay, she noticed that the dog seemed to turn vicious and attack black people on the spot - yet was as calm as a pacific wave when with herself and other demonstrably whiteskinned folks. After a few more incidents, Seberg added 1 + 1 together, and deduced that the dog had been trained to attack blackskinned people exclusively, viciously, a 'white dog' literally & figuratively. For the obvious reasons, Fuller was attracted to the material and made a go of it that would have failed miserably in any other director's care - Fuller braves the controversy explicit in the content through a mixture of guts & outrageousness: he doesn't hesitate to take selfaware shots of the dog watching violent television (clips from a loud war film) before the mutt's unleashed on a wouldbe robber/rapist - then continues with a shot of the dog crashing down through glass from a 2nd floor window (similar to the action hero's common practice of breaking through glass in slow motion) to extend its mauling of the foiled rapist - after which we are treated to shots of the dog's excessively bloodied maw and snarling teeth, etc. The camera hovers over the white dog as it would over an exotic beast unseen in its wilderness, fascinated with the sudden demonism that unfurls underneath an apparently innocuous skin of white fur.
Fuller does not stop there - he makes risibly hypothetical choices in the manner in which he presents (several times in the film) the unwitting black man who comes across the ferocious white dog: the camera tracks the well attired feet of a man whose late 70s style of dress & whose particular strut alludes to the idea of a black man (supported of course by the already evident direction of the subject matter) - while simultaneously following the loose white dog on its warpath in the opposite direction: when the future victim & oppressor finally cross paths, Fuller's camera scrolls up and reveals for the 1st time what we had anticipated: the man whom we had been following, - whose promenading feet were the sole articles of evidence allotted us to develop our visual prejudice - was indeed a black man; his widening terror-stricken eyes (at the moment that our eyes rest on his face) suddenly recognize the whiteness of the dog (i.e. the whiteness of the Whale that Ahab so feared), to the extent that it dawns on him - as it had dawned on us - that the unregenerately lupine dog presents a terror older than the rearing of racism's ugly head: namely that the whiteness of the dog signifies a deathlike, incomprehensible sheen of unyielding automation. The dog is programmed to 'hate' - and it is on this psychological point of departure that the film centers its main plotline (shared by all horror films that attempt the hopeless examination of the beast's mind, the stalker's hand, the insatiable killer's obsession). The story's hero, the animal trainer Keys - a black man fittingly -, decides to focus his powers of patience on deprogramming the white dog of its racist tendencies. After a hardfought success with the dog (who momentarily turns away from the darkside by gradually learning to accept the constant exposure to Keys' black skin - another one of Fuller's fearlessly risible hypotheses, made especially humorous when Keys practices taking his shirt off for the animal's benefit), the struggle thenceforward works its way to a memorably horror-genre ending, in which the white dog appears & reappears on the verge of attacking everyone in sight, white & black skinned alike, in a series of slowmotion shots and circular pans. The inevitable tragedy that ensues leaves one to ponder the flights of boldness in Fuller's technique, as Ennio Morricone's piano theme accompanies the camera's bird's-eye-view of the trainer's arena in which one more white dog has been permanently deprogrammed... for good. The fable of the story being that the monster is merely a product of a far more monstrous systematization (i.e. the still unerased monster of racism in our society & so forth).
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