So while de Bont was cranking away on top of the station wagon he was completely blind and could only guess whether his camera was stopping in the correct spots to keep Wallace and Pintauro center frame. The shot is even more impressive considering that it was accomplished years before the advent of video village monitors, where key members of production watch exactly what the camera is recording on a tv screen. Though de Bont's shot has been largely overlooked as an artsy flourish, it remains one of the scariest in the history of horror because of how intimately it locks the viewer into the terrified headspace of the protagonist. Related: A Cujo Remake Wouldn't Work According to Star Dee Wallace While standing on the roof of the station wagon de Bont twisted his makeshift rig in circles like he was trying to turn on a hand-crank radio.
It looked like a smaller version of the periscopes that submarines use to look around above the ocean surface. He then mounted a periscopic lens on the bottom of a pole-like rig and stuck it into the hole. De Bont took one of these Pintos and sawed a hole in the roof. On a soundstage this concept is generally applied to removing interior walls and ceilings which are referred to as “fly walls” because they can fly out of the camera’s way whenever necessary. So they bought several duplicate 1978 Ford Pintos and sawed them into pieces to give de Bont some more wiggle room with his camera. With the climax of Cujo confined to the interior of a station wagon, Teague and Blatt became increasingly concerned that the shots could quickly become too repetitive to maintain the claustrophobic tension they needed. The novel's contained setting was happily grandfathered in, as it enabled a Cujo film adaptation to be shot on the kind of low budget that many hit slasher films of the era were using, like John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) and Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). Of course, it didn’t hurt that King’s '80s tale of a demented dog required only minimal shooting locations like a cost-effective “bottle episode” of television. Cujo was the perfect vehicle to put the bestselling horror novelist back on the big screen.
The financial success of the actual Jaws sequels, Jaws II (1978) and Jaws 3-D (1983), further cemented the notion in early 1980s Hollywood that moviegoers were hungry for more man-versus-beast action horror. After all, the horror market in the late 1970s and early 1980s was saturated with Jaws ripoffs like Tobe Hooper’s Eaten Alive (1976), William Girdler’s Grizzly (1976), Joe Dante’s Piranha (1978), and Lewis Teague’s Alligator (1980). King’s creature feature-like plot and claustrophobic climax made Cujo a shoo-in for a Hollywood film adaptation.
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