One of the favoured pastimes of a childhood family holiday (too old to be tucked up in bed early, too young for ten-franc bottles of wine and pursuing Dutch girls), was to round up a group of other kids, grab a load of torches and set out into the several acres of woodland that surrounded our campsite. Ostensibly, this was in search of fun and adventure, but it was mostly for the sake of scaring the younger children senseless. Tales abounded of random pit-traps hidden on the paths, vicious wild boar roaming free, that kind of thing.
So imagine our delight when, on one particularly epic exploration, we stumbled into the grounds of le chateau and found, in the middle of a large mound of earth, a door leading inside, down to what appeared to be some sort of hidden shelter. This was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to us! The tunnel seemed to go on for ages! There were bats! The girls were looking visibly scared! It was like the Goonies, only without the gangsters and booby traps and other dangerous things.
Our excitement was brought to an abrupt end. “Ssh!”, said some long-forgotten holiday friend. “That sounds like dogs barking. I swear they’re getting louder.” I’d never run so fast in all my life.
Of course, they were probably chained up after all. Security firms, by and large, do not let angry German Shepherds loose on unsuspecting intruders. The fear is all in the anticipation, the knowledge of approaching danger, the blind panic that sets as you work out whether that barking is far enough away to give you time to finish your drunken piss and get the hell out of that industrial estate. And of course, that’s exactly what they want you to think.
Cinematically, meanwhile, being chased by angry guard dogs is the inevitable fate of either the hapless buffoon, the comedy bastard or, in the case of Ed Rooney from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, both. And no one wants to end up looking like that, do they?