Chow Down On These Cujo Facts

While "Cujo" may be a metaphor for King's addiction, the actual story has its roots in an unexpected and unsettling experience. As King writes on his website, in 1977, he needed to get his motorcycle fixed, so he went to "the middle of nowhere" to see a mechanic in Bridgton, Maine. King found himself effectively stranded in a part of the town he didn't know well on the property of a mechanic he had never met before. It's an uncomfortable situation in and of itself. Then the mechanic's huge dog lumbered into view.

As King elaborates in an interview with The Paris Review, it wasn't just the size of the dog — which was a Saint Bernard — that scared him. It was also the fact that it growled and lunged at King, despite the mechanic insisting it wasn't a dangerous dog. "Those dogs look horrible anyway, particularly in summer," the author recalled. "They've got the dewlaps, and they've got the runny eyes. They don't look like they're well." From that experience, the "villain" of "Cujo," its setting, and the mechanic/owner of Cujo Joe Camber (Ed Lauter in the film) sprang. 

King was so affected by that brief interaction that he continued to turn it over in his head, imagining what might have happened if it was his wife taking in a broken down car instead of him. In this way, the story evolved from the rather frightening but ultimately still benign encounter with an aggressive dog into a tale of a mother and son facing off against a rabid canine possibly possessed by a serial killer.