Joe Cappa’s ‘Ghost Dogs’ Probably Aren’t Anybody’s Best Friend, But You Should Watch This Short Anyway

Filmmaker Joe Cappa has uploaded his first professional short Ghost Dogs (2020), which enjoyed an impressive festival run including stops at Fantasia, Fantoche, GLAS, Ottawa, and Sundance, to name a few.

The short turns on a cute yellow puppy with a red ribbon around its neck and a robot vacuum hard at work cleaning a home that looks to have just been the location of a festive party. As the vacuum makes its way across the dirty floors, several ghost dogs with human appendages and psionic abilities appear, pleasuring themselves to dog food commercials and engaging in a fair bit of ominous looming.

Meanwhile, our puppy protagonist rests peacefully in the kitchen, protected by a small gate that seems to keep the phantoms at bay. After a brief nap, the puppy awakens to find the gate has been knocked over and leaves the kitchen to explore the house, lured to a dark doorway by a clicking sound like those used by dog trainers meant to elicit a Pavlovian response.

Creepiness turns to downright terror as the house’s proportions are stretched and twisted unnaturally, while shadows of the malformed ghost dogs flitter across the walls. We’re taken on a psychedelic trip similar to Dumbo’s “Pink Elephants on Parade” before the living pup makes his way to the basement where the sinister nature of the home’s owners is revealed, providing a morbid explanation for the house’s supernatural nature.