Targets (1968) is the horror film that points its camera at a drive-in movie screen and then very slowly turns it around. Peter Bogdanovich's debut feature is a split narrative: on one side, Byron Orlok, a fading Gothic horror star who feels his brand of monster has become quaint. On the other, Bobby Thompson, a young veteran with a trunk full of rifles, a beautiful wife, and nothing recognisably wrong with him until there is. The two stories converge in a single location, and by then the word "horror" has quietly changed its meaning.
What the film is actually doing
Bogdanovich made Targets partly because Roger Corman gave him leftover Boris Karloff footage and a two-day window to shoot new scenes with the actor himself. That constraint became the film's subject. Karloff plays Orlok as a man who knows the era of Gothic menace is over, who keeps quoting Lord Byron and feeling embarrassed by his own image on theatre marquees. His monster is the kind that wears a cape and lives in a castle. The film's argument is simple and devastating: that monster is not frightening anymore because real life got there first.
Bobby Thompson, played by Tim O'Kelly with an almost unbearable blankness, is not a supernatural creature. He has a house, a mother, a father who watches television. His violence begins indoors, without warning, and then escalates to a freeway overpass and finally to a drive-in cinema. Bogdanovich shoots him in flat, daylit spaces. No shadows. No music cues that say something is wrong. That absence of genre scaffolding is the film's most frightening choice.
Karloff and the weight of the role
Boris Karloff was 80 years old during production. He agreed to the film partly because of his respect for Corman, partly because the script gave him something real to say. Orlok's speeches about obsolescence aren't played for pathos. Karloff delivers them as facts. There's a dinner scene in which Orlok decides to retire, and Karloff plays it with the kind of total stillness that takes decades to learn. It's one of the finest performances in late-career Hollywood, in a film that almost no one saw on release.
The casting works precisely because Karloff was already a cultural monument. Audiences in 1968 knew what he represented. Placing that history next to O'Kelly's perfectly ordinary sniper creates a contrast that doesn't need underlining. The old horror is theatrical, safe, containable within genre. The new horror wears a polo shirt and drives a station wagon.
The drive-in sequence
The film's final act takes place at a drive-in cinema screening one of Orlok's old pictures. Thompson sets up behind the screen and fires through a gap at the rows of cars. Bogdanovich cuts between the screen image of Orlok and the real Orlok moving through the lot toward the gunman. The montage is precise and controlled and genuinely upsetting. Thompson's victims don't know where the shots are coming from. Some of them assume the first death is part of the film.
That detail is the film's thesis made literal. The genre of horror has become so associated with entertainment that an audience can't immediately distinguish a real bullet from a sound effect. Bogdanovich doesn't belabour the point. He just holds the shot.
The ending itself is almost comic. Orlok disarms Thompson by walking toward him and hitting him repeatedly with his own shoe. There's no catharsis in it. The monster is caught, but not because heroism defeated evil. It's caught because it froze in the presence of something it didn't expect. That's not a satisfying resolution. It isn't meant to be.
Context and influence
Targets arrived in 1968, the same year as the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. Paramount reportedly considered shelving it. The film's portrait of a mass shooting, drawn explicitly from the 1966 University of Texas Tower shooting by Charles Whitman, felt less like fiction than a news transcript. It was released anyway, to limited distribution and critical respect, then largely forgotten until home video revived it.
The film belongs in the same conversation as Psycho (1960), which had already made the argument that the ordinary domestic setting was more frightening than any Gothic mansion. Hitchcock's film stripped the monster of its cape; Bogdanovich's strips it of its interiority entirely. Thompson has no explanation. The film offers none. Orlok, by contrast, is overflowing with inner life, with memory and regret and literature. The monster with depth is the one no longer capable of scaring anyone.
The film also anticipates the structural self-awareness of later horror, the idea that genre itself can be a subject. In the Mouth of Madness (1994) would later push this much further, collapsing the boundary between fiction and reality entirely. Bogdanovich is quieter about it. His genre commentary is a byproduct of something more disturbing: genuine uncertainty about what American violence actually looks like and where it comes from.
Why it still works
Targets is not a comfortable watch. It isn't meant to be. The horror genre has spent decades perfecting techniques for keeping audiences at a safe distance: the supernatural frame, the monster's design, the rule set that tells you who will survive. Bogdanovich removes all of those. Thompson cannot be reasoned with, cannot be appealed to, doesn't transform or reveal a buried wound that explains him. He buys more ammunition and keeps going.
What Bogdanovich understood is that the audience's relationship with genre images had become a kind of defence mechanism. Targets is available via the Criterion Collection, which is where it properly belongs: as a piece of American cinema that does the work of a social document without ever pretending to be one. It's a horror film that trusts the horror to arrive on its own.
Karloff died in February 1969, seven months after the film's release. Targets was his last substantial role. That the film gave him a character explicitly mourning his own obsolescence, and that Karloff played it with total dignity and no self-pity, is something. It doesn't resolve the film's central anxiety. Nothing does.