Man Bites Dog (French: C'est arrivé près de chez vous, literally "It Happened Near Your Home") is a 1992 French-language Belgian black comedy crime mockumentary film written, produced and directed by Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel and Benoît Poelvoorde, who are also the film's co-editor, cinematographer and lead actor respectively.

Since its release, the picture has become a cult film, and received a rare NC-17 rating for its theatrical release in the U.S.[2] Ben is a witty and charismatic but narcissistic and easily-enraged serial killer who holds forth at length about whatever comes to mind, be it the "craft" of murder, the failings of architecture, his own poetry, or classical music, which he plays with his girlfriend Valerie.

Ben takes them to meet his family and friends while boasting of murdering many people at random and dumping their bodies in canals and quarries.

Ben ventures into apartment buildings, explaining how it is more cost-effective to attack old people than young couples because the elderly have more cash at home and are easier to kill.

However, Ben also kills a real estate developer who rudely evicted one of his friends, and when he kills an immigrant night watchman at a construction site, he expresses concern that the construction company hired the African employee for unscrupulous reasons (before launching into his own racist tirade and requesting the film crew expose the body’s genitals).

At the same construction site, Ben points out where he killed and buried two Muslims, and explains that he made sure to entomb their bodies in a wall that faces Mecca.

When Ben invades a home and kills an entire family, they help him hold down a young boy and smother him with a pillow, all the while keeping up a casual conversation.

The following morning, the camera dispassionately records the aftermath: the woman has been butchered with a knife, her entrails spilling out, while the husband had his throat cut.

Man Bites Dog was shot in black and white on 16 mm film and was produced on a shoestring budget by four student filmmakers, led by director Rémy Belvaux.

[22] Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times highly praised the film upon its release, writing, "Man Bites Dog defines audacity.

[31] Writing for MTV, Sacha Howells said, "If anything, the film's comment on how documentaries and reality TV manipulate misery and violence for entertainment value is even more relevant now.

Man Bites Dog premiered the same year that the first Real World episodes aired, before the dozens of increasingly extreme shows that have come since…The disturbing film they left behind has more meaning today than it did when it was made, an indictment of a celebrity-obsessed culture that considers anyone in front of a camera to be a star.

Club in 2010, Scott Tobias said, "Five years before Michael Haneke’s even nastier Funny Games, Man Bites Dog also implicates the audience for watching it—a stand that has naturally made both films extremely polarizing.

When Rémy talks about never having enough [salacious content], it isn’t just the filmmakers who are guilty of insatiable bloodlust, but the unseen audience that regularly seeks out violence and mayhem as entertainment.

"[2] He also noted the film "forcefully reveals the lie of documentary 'objectivity,' this false notion that filmmakers can be flies on the wall and record life as it really happens.

"[2] He concluded, "Though time has made the big shocks in Man Bites Dog seem a little quaint—the careers of Haneke, Gaspar Noé, and Takashi Miike hastened that inevitability—the film looks wiser and more prescient now than it did in 1992.

Back then, most of the arguments about the film centered on whether it should even exist; before you could even broach a discussion about themes, you first had to come to terms with the nearly unprecedented horror of the rape scene, or the bleak comedy of bodies piling up without consequence.

"[33] He added the film's "gritty photography…helps to hammer home [its] brutal realism, with the hard shadows and lack of color making the Belgian setting look hopeless and dreary as Ben goes about his nihilistic shenanigans.

[9][35] The Criterion DVD restores scenes that were removed in edited versions and includes English-language interviews with Belvaux, Bonzel, and Poelvoorde.