13 Nights of Shocktober: Targets

by A.J.  

This is my favorite time of year, second only to Christmas. Autumn has arrived, the weather is cooling down, and October becomes the month long celebration of scary movies called Shocktober. There are a lot of horror movies out there, but as a genre, horror is still looked down upon by some mainstream critics and moviegoers. It doesn’t help that, admittedly, there are so few quality horror movies made but, like comedy, it’s a very difficult and subjective genre. So, in the days leading up Halloween I’ll be posting some recommendations for scary movies to help you celebrate Shocktober.

Night 10: Meta-Horror Night, “You know what they call my films today? Camp! High camp!”

Targets

Targets is a very peculiar film. It is more of a slow burn thriller than a traditional horror movie, but it is partly about horror films and meditates on both horror movies and real life horrors. Targets is director Peter Bogdanovich’s first feature film. He made the film in 1968 for legendary producer Roger Corman, whose only requirements of Bogdanovich was that he use actor Boris Karloff (who owed Corman two days’ work), and use stock footage from Corman’s 1963 film, The Terror (starring Boris Karloff). The story could be about anything. Bogdanovich wrote the screenplay with then wife Polly Platt, who was also the production designer. The result is a dual story, low budget movie that moves slow, but is interesting.

Boris Karloff plays an elderly horror movie legend named Byron Orlok who wants to retire against the wishes of the studio executives and the director of his latest movie, played by Peter Bogdanovich. The movie begins with the stock footage from The Terror (which also stars Jack Nicholson) doubling for footage of Orlok’s latest movie. It is a horror film with a castle, period costumes, and a terrible thunderstorm. It’s the kind of horror movie that Karloff himself made throughout his career, and like the films made by Hammer Films. Orlok is unhappy watching a preview of the film and decides to retire. He says that he feels like an anachronism and says the world belongs to the young. 

The second story is about a seemingly average, normal, clean cut looking young man named Bobby Thompson, played by Tim O'Kelly. He is a veteran and likes to collects guns. We see his home life; he and his wife live with his parents. He starts acting strangely. When out shooting at cans with a friend he lets the sight of his gun linger on the other person while their back is turned. He is distant from his wife and smokes in bed with all of the lights turned out. Then he types a cryptic note in red ink on his typewriter and begins a killing spree. He takes his rifle and some other guns, finds a high place, and starts picking off people.

The stories are not related directly but you know that they will eventually intersect. Bogdanovich works subtly to meld the stories together. The first time we see the Thompson is in a gun shop across the street from where Orlok screened his movie. The young man puts Orlok in his gunsight and lets it linger. It is safe to assume that the two men will have a confrontation at the premiere of Orlok’s movie at the drive-in theater where he will make his final public appearance before retiring. 

You can tell that Bogdanovich really wanted his movie to be 90 minutes long. Scenes play out a bit longer than they should and sometimes that helps the narrative, sometimes it doesn’t. There are several extended scenes of the Bobby Thompson’s average home life as he is becoming slowly and quietly unhinged. These scenes don’t really build character, but when they work, they have you searching for clues for why he’s cracking up. Even then, however, these scenes could still be shorter. The most effective of these lengthy scenes happens when Thompson is up on a refinery tower and unpacks his lunch. It’s an odd, humanizing moment (even psycho killers need to eat too), and it means that he planned ahead enough to pack a lunch, which is unnerving.    

The scenes with Boris Karloff work purely because it is interesting to watch Karloff playing a character loosely based on himself. He spends his scenes either with his assistant contemplating retirement or with Bogdanovich, who is trying to convince him not to retire. I get the distinct feeling that their scenes together exist just because Bogdanovich wanted to hang out with Boris Karloff. I can’t blame him; I would’ve done the same thing. The best scene of Targets by far is of Karloff telling an audience an old ghost story about a man encountering Death.

This movie was made at a time when the country was changing, culture was changing, and all the while the Vietnam War raged in the background. Targets is not explicitly about gun control, mental health, or even Vietnam, though the specter of each looms over every scene. It seems fairly obvious that the young man is based on Charles Whitman, who killed several people from the University of Texas tower in Austin only two years prior. That very year, 1968, would see two American political figures, each a symbol of promise and hope in their own way, gunned down by assassins: Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. If you read books about film history, Targets will likely be in more than one of those books. It is not a landmark film like Rosemary’s Baby or Night of the Living Dead but it is a notable part of the shift that began to occur in horror films in the late 60s.

Up until this time in film history nearly every horror film was set in the past, in a faraway land, or a large spooky house or castle. The most notable exception to this was a few horror films produced by Val Lewton in the 1940s and 50s. That changed in 1968, the same year Targets was released, with movies like Rosemary’s Baby and George Romero's Night of the Living Dead that set the supernatural in a modern setting subtly and believably. As George Romero continued to make horror films, soon joined by Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, and David Cronenberg, horror films moved further and further away from costumes and monsters in castles. The most interesting aspects of Targets are its juxtaposition of real and movie horrors, and its awareness of the fading out of fashion of Gothic, fantasy horror movies in the character of Byron Orlok. Karloff as Orlok sees newspaper headlines of shootings and murders and becomes depressed. “Nobody’s afraid of a painted monster,” Orlok says in one scene. His horror movies can’t compare to the horrors in the newspaper and, soon, he feels, the public will feel the same.