34. Targets

Targets was made in part because Boris Karloff owed Roger Corman two days’ work. Corman gave Bogdanovich a chance to write and direct based on him burning off the rest of Karloff’s contract, and that he re-used some footage shot for another Karloff film. That gives us half the story, where aging horror icon Byron Orlok declares his retirement will start after a personal appearance at the drive-in premiere of his most recent film. Meanwhile, a fanboy director tries to convince him to make one more picture.

But if you only have two days of Karloff, how are you going to turn that into a full feature? That’s where you bring in a story about a mass shooter (inspired by the Tower shooting at the University of Texas), and send this killer on a cross-city rampage headed toward the very drive-in Orlok’s movie premieres at.

It’s a confrontation between an older, gothic horror and a modern, seemingly random violence erupting in everyday spaces. Karloff is a perfect embodiment of that creeping horror of cinema’s past where you never needed any clues as to who the monster was. His counterpart, gunman Bobby Thompson, is a clean-cut young man who could blend in just about anywhere. It’s his lack of defining physical characteristics that make his actions all the more frightening.

The final sequence at the drive-in is complex and layered, with moments of people isolated from one another in their cars, unable to realize that a man is picking them off from behind the screen. It’s the cultural equivalent of if someone in the present day was shown doomscrolling on their phone and missing out on the person next to them getting stabbed.

I saw this film for the first time in a class about Road Movies, and there’s plenty of driving even if they don’t cover much ground. The people in their cars at the drive-in. The drivers picked off from the tower overlooking the highway. People are constantly on the move and isolated from each other, but not insulated from the violence around them.

The thing that keeps me coming back is how deftly this film acts as a meta-commentary on what scares us as humans and as a moviegoing audience. When there are so many possible ways that real life horror could intrude on our lives, why do we seek out scares? What is it about witnessing fictional acts of violence and terror that gets us reaching for the popcorn?

There was also something about Peter Bogdanovich that was inspiring to me when I first saw it, as well. He was a student of film, and apprentice and acolyte of many iconic names of cinema. Like the Cahiers du Cinema to French New Wave director pipeline, I saw the potential for what I was interested in being something worth putting on screen because of how much I was pulled in by this film nerd B-movie. It gave me a feeling of permission to be as nerdy as I wanted to be.