TARGETS 1968
I’ve always been drawn to Targets 1968 not just as a tight, gripping horror thriller but for the bittersweet nostalgia it carries—Boris Karloff’s final bow on screen feels like a tender farewell to the old Gothic fairy tale horrors that shaped so much of cinema’s past. Watching Karloff, you sense the closing of a chapter, while the film quietly ushers in a new era defined by raw, real-life violence, a stark, unsettling kind of monster born not from shadows but from the fractures of modern fear. It’s in the meeting of these two worlds, the timeless and the terrifyingly new, that Targets finds its haunting power. This convergence creates an experience that’s as much about reflecting on what we’ve lost as it is about confronting what’s coming. Some moments play so unflinchingly close, it’s as if the gun’s smoke could brush your face, certain scenes hit you with the immediacy of a witness, as if you’re standing just a breath away when the shots ring out. I’m eager to dive deeper into this richly real film and its legacy in a more involved piece for The Last Drive-In, where I can explore how these themes still resonate today, a vivid reckoning with American fear.
From Celluloid Phantoms to Living Nightmares: Unmasking American Terror in Targets:
Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets (1968) paved the way for independent horror, marking both the director’s confident feature debut and the bittersweet farewell to Boris Karloff’s illustrious career. The film innovatively bound together two parallel narratives: one following Byron Orlok (Karloff), an aging horror movie legend weary of his own fading genre, and the other tracking Bobby Thompson (Tim O’Kelly), a seemingly all-American young man unraveling into a cold-blooded mass shooter.
Some of Peter Bogdanovich’s thoughts:
“What terrified audiences in the Thirties was no longer terrifying. … What was terrifying in 1968 was this random violence, people being killed for no reason.”
“The idea that fear has evolved into something far different. Ghost stories & creepy characters no longer cut it. The new brand of terror is faceless, anonymous, soulless and random. Enter the phenomenon of the mass killer.”
“It is spare, clean, modern, lacking in embellishment or decoration, but the people speak naturally, move fluidly and seem real. And there is a stillness, again a feeling enhanced by the lack of music, that creates verisimilitude, but also a general sense of unease.”
Bogdanovich conceived Targets with help from his wife, Polly Platt, and input from Sam Fuller, against the backdrop of a turbulent 1960s America marked by real-life violence, including the Texas Tower sniper Charles Whitman’s killings, and the looming shadow of political assassinations, which directly inspired Bobby Thompson’s character.
Roger Corman produced Targets and set the unusual ground rules that shaped it: Peter Bogdanovich had to use stock footage from Corman’s earlier film The Terror 1963 and cast Boris Karloff, who was under contract to Corman and owed him two days’ work. Beyond that, Corman gave Bogdanovich free rein, but these quirky constraints ended up influencing the film’s distinctive dual-story structure. Karloff was so impressed with the film’s script that he refused any pay for any shooting time over his contracted two days, working for a total of five days on it.
When Roger Corman brought Peter Bogdanovich on to direct, he asked if he knew the directorial styles of Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks. Hitchcock was precise, efficient, and organized, while Hawks had a more kinetic, partly improvised shooting style. Corman’s advice was simple: shoot it like Hitchcock.
Sam Fuller, famed for his lean, realism, and hard-edged storytelling, gave Targets an uncredited rewrite, shaping its tone, tightening its structure, and advising Bogdanovich to save the narrative’s ‘firepower’ for the shocking climax. His fingerprints are all over the film’s crisp, unsentimental edge, even without his name on the credits.
Targets is the first feature film for production designer and writer Polly Platt, who was married to director Bogdanovich at the time. They would collaborate on several films in the future, The Last Picture Show 1971 and Paper Moon 1973 in particular. The Last Picture Show was nominated for eight Oscars in 1972, including Best Picture and Best Director for Peter Bogdanovich. The film won two Academy Awards: Best Actor in a Supporting Role for Ben Johnson and Best Actress in a Supporting Role for Cloris Leachman. Paper Moon would earn a total of 10 nominations, including for Best Supporting Actress for Madeline Kahn.
Polly Platt’s mark on Targets went far beyond her credits as production and costume designer; she helped shape the script itself, even co-conceiving its dual narrative and the chilling ‘Vietnam vet-turned-sniper’ storyline. Her eye for realism and emotional detail grounded the film’s suburban scenes, which were steeped in truth and blended seamlessly with its terror. Bogdanovich himself has called her a true co-creator, with her influence woven through both its look and the construction of the story.
Targets would not have emerged as the sharp, modern meditation it is without Sam Fuller’s incisive script work and Polly Platt’s foundational creativity and storytelling insight. Their combined efforts shaped not only the film’s message but also its method, merging classic genre elements with an urgent, contemporary edge.
Poised between the shadows of classic cinematic horror and the harsh dawn, the rise of raw, modern terror, Targets plays out as a chilling outward gaze on the fragile and shifting landscape of fear and violence. Other than the music that naturally belongs in the scene, like a tune drifting from a car radio, Targets moves ahead without any score.
The film opens with footage from Roger Corman’s The Terror (1963), featuring Karloff as Byron Orlok, who is watching a screening of one of his old horror films. Orlok is a man disillusioned by the shift from theatrical monsters to real-world violence; an irony not lost considering that Boris Karloff, whose career defined the golden age of classic horror, embodies this very character.
This opening quietly, but powerfully sets up the film’s central tension; it poignantly contrasts Karloff’s legacy of iconic, supernatural terror with the raw, unsettling violence of contemporary reality, making clear how real-life horrors have eclipsed the old-time monsters.
Boris Karloff was 80 when he made Targets, and his health was failing; he was battling advanced emphysema and rheumatoid arthritis, wore leg braces, and often needed a cane just to stand. You can even catch glimpses of that frailty in a few scenes. But he hung on long enough to see the finished film and to enjoy the praise it rightfully brought him, a well-deserved ovation for a legendary career.
Although Byron Orlok in Targets may look and sound a bit like Boris Karloff, the real man was worlds apart from his fictional counterpart. Both were iconic British actors forever linked to horror, but where Orlok is jaded with the industry and ready to walk away, Karloff never lost his gratitude for the career it gave him. Far from resenting his reputation as a ‘horror actor,’ he embraced it with grace and pride, especially his turn as Frankenstein’s Monster, a role he spoke of with deep fondness and respect. That warmth, that humility, and the way he carried his legacy with quiet dignity are part of why Karloff wasn’t just admired—he was beloved.
Orlok dismisses contemporary horrors as beyond anything he can evoke. He shrugs at modern horrors, thinking they’re worse than anything he could dream up, far darker than anything he could ever bring to life. He is accompanied by his secretary, Jenny (Nancy Hsueh), who also has a personal connection with the young writer-director Sammy Michaels (director Peter Bogdanovich, who plays a significant part in the picture), who is dating her. Throughout the film, she plays a practical role in Orlok’s life, helping manage his engagements, including the final promotional appearance at the drive-in theater that will bring him face to face with the mass shooter, Bobby.
Jenny: (speaking sharply) You’d love it if somehow you could convince yourself you’ve been betrayed by everyone. Then, you’d really be happy. No guilt and full of self-pity.
Byron Orlok: Quite a speech!
Jenny: You ought to hear it in Chinese.
In the mix is also Byron’s Orlok’s manager, Ed Laughlin (Arthur Peterson), who urges Orlok to attend the premiere of his latest film at a drive-in theater, but Orlok initially resists.
With a fight in his old soul, he holds onto nostalgia, standing firm in a world that’s stopped fearing the old painted monsters. He’s still holding on to an old kind of fear that could still send a chill through the theater, even though the world has moved on. Marshall Smith tells Orlok: If it weren’t for me, the only place you’d be playing is in the Wax Museum!
Byron Orlok: My kind of horror isn’t horror anymore.
Byron Orlok: You know what they call my films today? Camp! High camp!
Byron Orlok: Oh, Sammy, what’s the use? Mr. Boogey Man, King of Blood they used to call me. Marx Brothers make you laugh, Garbo makes you weep, Orlok makes you scream.
Byron Orlok: Sammy, you’re a sweet boy, but you can’t possibly understand what it feels like to be *me*. I’m an antique, out of date.
Sammy Michaels: Alright, what are you going to do? Plant roses? Actors don’t retire! In about six months and you’ll blow your brains out, Byron.
Byron Orlok: I’m an anachronism.
Sammy Michaels: What does that mean?
Byron Orlok: Sammy, look around. The world belongs to the young. Make way for them. Let them have it.
Meanwhile, across town, Bobby Thompson visits a gun shop, acquiring a high-powered semi-automatic rifle and adding it to an already disturbing arsenal stashed in his car trunk. He returns to the gleaming sterility of a middle-class suburban American home, where the emotional coldness beneath the surface is almost painful to watch. His home is the picture of a sanitized Americana, tidy desolation, a still-life of suburbia. With its sparse walls and tight, airless rooms, the house feels claustrophobic by design; it’s Bogdanovich’s way of mirroring the warped, grim fairy tale that is Bobby’s life.
His relationship with his wife, Ilene (Tanya Morgan), who is emotionally distant, disinterested, and disconnected from Bobby’s troubled inner world, doesn’t help his increasingly violent delusions and calm disintegration.
Bobby Thompson: I don’t know what’s happening to me.
Ilene Thompson: Why?
Bobby Thompson: I get funny ideas.
Only deepening the cracks, in the same cold orbit, his parents, father Robert (James Brown), and mother Charlotte (Mary Jackson), are distant and fraught with silent resentment.
The family as a whole lives like performers in a forgettable 1950s sitcom turned bleak domestic tragedy, a slow-burning nightmare, with a home environment devoid of warmth or genuine connection. This dynamic underscores Bobby’s isolation and inability to communicate his internal struggles, which intensifies the film’s chilling portrayal of modern terror and emotional alienation. After an unsettling shooting range outing with his father, where Bobby almost fires at him, tensions simmer beneath the suburban facade, hinting at the psychological fractures driving Bobby’s disconnection with the people around him and his simmering exploration into violence.
Bobby’s dark unraveling, his descent into a murderous spiral, begins in chilling fashion: after his father leaves for work, Bobby methodically murders his wife, mother, and an unfortunate grocery deliveryman in the wrong place at the right time. His cold detachment is unnerving, underscoring a psychopathic quiet, as quiet as a held breath, a calm before the storm. After he kills his wife and mother, he types out a message stating that he has committed these murders and warns that more people will die before he is caught or killed.
At the same time, Orlok finally agrees to make a public appearance at the drive-in premiere, where he plans to read a ghost story to the audience after the film. This is where the two stories edge closer, their separate tracks pulled by the same dark gravity toward an inevitable final reckoning.
I think a huge part of why the atmosphere in Targets feels so disquieting lies in the Hungarian American László Kovács’ cinematography. He blends a naturalistic, almost documentary style with carefully stylized visual elements —sterile suburban interiors, sprawling highways, and the evocative drive-in theater, to create a world that feels both familiar and subtly charged with menace. Kovács shoots the film with a pastel-leaning color palette and carefully balanced lighting to emphasize the atmosphere and mood of unsettling realism. To give the film more emotional and thematic depth, he uses color in a subtle but purposeful way, shifting between warm and cool tones to quietly set characters and settings apart, visually distinguishing them from each other.
His eye gives the film a fresh, gritty realism that feels worlds apart from Boris Karloff’s Gothic horror past. That contrast, the theatrical shadows of Orlok’s old films set against Kovacs’ unvarnished lens, perfectly captures the shift from classic Hollywood’s horror’s constructed fantasy and cinematic illusion of monsters to the stark reality of modern violence of late ’60s America.
Shots of Bobby calmly loading his weapons, shown alongside Orlok’s reflective and weary eyes, visually represent that colliding fantasy and harsh reality. The suburban home scenes carry an oppressive, sterile quality, raising the level of psychological alienation at the heart of the story.
Bogdanovich carefully stages Bobby’s shooting spree with a detached yet gripping precision. After positioning himself on top of an oil storage tank near a busy freeway, Bobby begins randomly firing at motorists, the film chillingly showcasing mass violence happening from a distance, echoing actual events from the 1960s.
This act of terror draws the tension taut as wire, and ruptures the quiet with a sudden storm of bullets and fear, winding those moments tighter until it trembles on screen, while the police respond with increasing urgency. Bobby’s evasion of capture by hiding at the drive-in theater screening Orlok’s film draws the two plots intimately together for a final, iconic confrontation.
The climax at the drive-in is one of cinematic history’s most tense moments. Bobby infiltrates the theater, quietly killing a handful of patrons while the horror film plays, spilled in light across the drive-in screen. The final collision, the rupture where worlds bleed together, the point where the silver screen tears and something darker steps through, a violent meeting of celluloid phantoms and flesh-and-blood fear meet up. Between the imagined and the inevitability of real-life terror intruding on cinematic fantasy is visually and emotionally jarring.
Orlok, a relic of old Hollywood’s theatrical monsters, watches this play out with a mix of wistfulness and resignation as the world around him witnesses a turning point where real death comes not from fantasy but from the withdrawn and wrathful, trading imagined, invented horrors for the all-too-real violence of the alienated and the unseen.
Karloff’s Orlok, initially reluctant and seemingly out of place in this story, meets in defiance and stands against this new type of monster. The showdown between the old horror icon and the modern killer becomes a metaphor for the death of one kind of fear and the rise of another, the mythic gives way to the real, and the legendary face of terror contends with cold, faceless threat, an anonymous fury, and the far-reaching darkness of the soul.
Orlok’s final act — he confronts Bobby toward the film’s climax after Bobby runs out of ammunition during his shooting spree at the drive-in theater. Orlok disarms him by knocking a gun from his hand with his cane and then physically subdues him by slapping him multiple times in the face; it symbolizes the uncertain struggle against a society increasingly gripped by real-world horrors.
[Bobby Thompson cowers before Byron Orlok]
Byron Orlok: Is *that* what I was afraid of?
On the surface, Targets is a horror thriller, a quiet shocker, but it’s powered by a keen understanding that takes it somewhere richer. It cuts deep with sharp psychological insight, driven by an unflinching look into the human mind with its razor-sharp eye for the psychology behind the fear.
Bobby’s unraveling isn’t shown as just an outburst of violence; it feels more like the endpoint of a deep social and personal disconnect. His detachment and alienation, his inability to talk to the people around him, and that hollow sense of existential emptiness and meaninglessness all reflect a wider cultural restlessness, one that grew from the cracks in the American dream, the isolating sterility of suburban life, and the growing unease of a country facing overseas wars and unrest at home.
The film subtly critiques how society isolates people and seduces them with a fascination for violence, media spectacle, and consumerism’s spiritual void.
The performances give the film its emotional heart. Karloff, playing a role that mirrors his own legacy, brings Orlok to life with a touching mix of dignity, sadness, and quiet defiance. Tim O’Kelly’s portrayal of Bobby is chillingly detached, his calm demeanor heightening the menace within the tense, fractious environment that fuels the tragedy.
Within the landscape of independent horror, Targets is iconic for its inventive melding of classic horror movie chills with urgent contemporary realities of its own time. It forecasts the rise of the “real monster” trope and influences later portrayals of the kind of terror that is wearing the plain face of everyday life, dressed as the familiar, paving the way for mass violence and societal breakdown in cinema. With his first time in the director’s chair, Bogdanovich delivers a sharp, unsettling look at fear itself, capturing that uneasy moment when innocence gave way to a harsher, more grim reality.
In the end, Targets plays like a blunt jolt of American dread, reality stripped of comfort and a cold stare into its violence. It is a searing psychological and cultural portrait, a film where the monsters are both on screen and hiding in plain sight, even as they breathe among us. Fantasy and reality grind against each other until the distance between them collapses, leaving a stark mural of American violence, alienation, and the shifting nature of what we fear and what is truly terrifying. Its lasting power lies in its haunting blend of homage and sharp critique, tragedy and suspense, making it a groundbreaking work that still feels uncomfortably, chillingly relevant.
When it was released in 1968, Bogdanovich’s Targets received a mix of thoughtful critical attention and some reservations, but it was widely regarded as a landmark work that had the vision to see what was coming in independent horror cinema.
Dave Kehr of The Chicago Reader called it “an interesting response to the demands of low-budget genre filmmaking,” noting that while it worked within tight production constraints, it brought a fresh perspective to horror’s evolving nature. Variety highlighted Bogdanovich’s skill with “implied violence,” observing that he deftly conveyed moments of “shock, terror, suspense and fear” without gratuitous gore, which amplified the film’s psychological impact.
When I look at Targets, what stands out for me is how chillingly it captures this new kind of horror – one that isn’t born out of monsters but rather, emerges from random, senseless violence—in a young mass killer, echoing real-life events that were occurring at the time (and tragically, today, it’s become an epidemic of collective trauma), like Charles Whitman’s 1966 shooting spree and the 1968 assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. The film’s release amid this climate made its messages both urgent and challenging for audiences to face, contributing to its initial commercial failure.
But its critical power endures, as a somber mirror reflecting the shadowy shift in American fear. Quentin Tarantino hailed it as “one of the most powerful films of 1968 and one of the greatest directorial debuts of all time,” calling it “the best film ever produced by Roger Corman” and praising its bold social commentary on gun violence embedded within a thriller framework.
Boris Karloff in Targets is in his element; he’s handing down a quiet, powerful legacy wrapped in every look and pause, a final bow from one of horror’s true legends, marking his final screen role, which was widely noted as dignified, distinguished, and noble. Watching him, you sense the weight of an era gently fading and the resilience in that dignity and sadness. Karloff doesn’t just play a character; he embodies the soul of a changing cinema, carrying the weight of a bygone era with dignified grace and deep emotional resonance. It’s a deeply emotional, almost poetic testimony to his craft, rooted in reverence but alive with the complexity of modern fear. His final role feels like a whispered farewell and a lasting imprint on the heart of horror itself.
Karloff’s portrayal brought emotional and thematic depth, a performance that feels like a poignant bridge between two worlds: the shadowy, classic theatricality and iconography of horror’s cinematic past and the raw, unsettling violence creeping into reality with this film’s more disturbing modern themes. It symbolizes the passing of an era in horror cinema and the unsettling rise of a more violent hard truth.
[last lines —to the police as he is being arrested] Bobby Thompson: I hardly ever missed, did I?
Ritter was nominated for Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role in this film!
