The making of it
Targets is a low-budget 1968 American film that sets two parallel figures in collision: Boris Karloff’s Byron Orlok, a retired horror actor disillusioned by real-world violence, and Tim O’Kelly’s Bobby Thompson, a suburban insurance agent who commits a methodical, motiveless killing spree. It is not a conventional horror film but a structural provocation — a genre hybrid that uses the grammar of thriller and drive-in exploitation to frame a direct, unsentimental question about fear’s changing source. The film tries to do three things at once: honour Karloff’s legacy while dismantling its conventions; dramatise the shift from symbolic to literal violence in late-1960s America; and test whether a studio-system veteran and a first-time director could make something urgent on $130,000. Its ambition is historical as much as aesthetic: to locate horror not in castles or monsters but in the unremarkable face of the man next door, and in the silence between news bulletins. It does not seek to explain Thompson, nor to rehabilitate Orlok — it holds them in tension, like two ends of a fraying wire.
The shape of it
The story moves in tight, economical strokes: Orlok’s retirement announcement, Thompson’s domestic breakdown, their converging paths toward a drive-in theatre. Bogdanovich edits with surgical restraint — no flashbacks, no exposition beyond what the characters say or do. László Kovács shoots interiors with flat, uninflected light, avoiding chiaroscuro even when Karloff is on screen; exteriors are captured guerilla-style on Los Angeles freeways, silent during filming, with sound added later. Karloff’s performance is contained, weary, precise — his monologue from Appointment in Samarra delivered in one unbroken take, not for show but as a quiet pivot point. O’Kelly plays Thompson without affectation or interiority, which works because the script refuses psychological scaffolding. Samuel Fuller’s uncredited input shows in the economy of action and the refusal to moralise. The film’s craft is functional, not flamboyant: it builds suspense through duration (a long shot of Thompson loading a rifle), repetition (the click of a safety), and absence (no score during the freeway sequence). Every decision serves the central contrast: myth versus fact, ritual versus rupture.
The look of it
What lands is the dissonance — the way Karloff’s presence, so deeply associated with controlled, theatrical dread, becomes an anchor against which Thompson’s banal, unperformative violence registers as more unsettling. The drive-in climax works not because it is visually spectacular, but because it stages a confrontation that feels inevitable yet irreconcilable: the old monster, bound by narrative rules, faces a new kind of antagonist who obeys none. The film’s timing — released weeks after the assassinations of King and Kennedy — gave its premise immediate, uncomfortable weight, and that resonance remains. The editing avoids sensationalism: the murders are implied or shown peripherally, trusting the viewer to fill gaps. Karloff’s final scene, where he watches Thompson’s rampage on a cinema screen before stepping into the light, lands with quiet gravity. The use of archive footage from The Terror and The Criminal Code does not feel like pastiche but a deliberate layering of cinematic history — the past literally projected onto the present. This is not nostalgia; it is archaeology.
The weight of it
What does not land is the attempt to fuse Orlok’s arc with Thompson’s into a single thematic whole. The two threads remain structurally separate — they meet only at the drive-in, and even there, their interaction is minimal. Orlok’s retirement speech, his conversations with Sammy Michaels, his quiet despair over being ‘outdated’: these moments gather emotional weight, but they do not interlock with Thompson’s actions in any causal or symbolic way beyond juxtaposition. The film’s thesis — that real violence has eclipsed fictional horror — is stated, not dramatised. Some performances falter under the script’s austerity: Mary Jackson and Mike Farrell, as Thompson’s parents, lack the specificity needed to make their obliviousness feel like social critique rather than narrative convenience. The film’s brevity (86 minutes) works against its ambition: it sketches ideas — media desensitisation, generational displacement, gun culture — but rarely develops them beyond assertion. Roger Ebert’s observation that the film might have been more effective without Karloff’s scenes is not wrong; his presence elevates the film, but also creates a gravitational pull that leaves Thompson’s world oddly under-illuminated.
The subject of it
The themes that matter are not those of horror but of erosion: the erosion of shared narrative frameworks, of professional dignity, of civic trust. Orlok represents a fading contract — the understanding that monsters appear in designated spaces, follow rules, and are defeated by dawn. Thompson embodies the collapse of that contract: his violence has no motive, no costume, no denouement. The film treats guns not as props but as extensions of routine — Thompson cleans them like cutlery, stores them like tools. The drive-in setting is crucial: a place where communal viewing gives way to isolation, where the screen separates audience from reality, and where that separation fails. The film’s political charge lies not in advocacy but in alignment — it places the Whitman-inspired spree within the same visual and temporal field as Hollywood’s manufactured terrors, refusing hierarchy between them. Ageing is treated not sentimentally but materially: Orlok’s body is tired, his voice thin, his authority contingent on studio schedules and fan mail. The film’s enduring relevance is not in its topicality but in its diagnosis: that horror no longer needs invention when reality supplies its own logic-free, consequence-free violence.
The audience for it
This film is for viewers who value formal concision over exposition, who find tension in silence and implication, and who are willing to sit with unresolved parallels rather than tidy resolutions. It rewards attention to framing, pacing, and the weight carried by a single glance — particularly Karloff’s. It is not for those who require character psychology, narrative symmetry, or catharsis. Anyone expecting a traditional thriller or a Karloff vehicle will be disappointed: his role is brief, deliberate, and deliberately diminished. Those put off by low-budget aesthetics — flat lighting, sparse sets, unpolished sound design — may mistake economy for indifference. The film assumes familiarity with mid-century Hollywood horror and the cultural shock of 1960s mass shootings; without that context, some layers recede. A viewer who values thematic clarity over ambiguity, or who prefers moral resolution to sustained unease, would find it frustrating. Its power depends on accepting that some questions — why Thompson? why now? why here? — are left open not from omission but from principle.
The staying power of it
Yes, it is worth your evening — not as entertainment but as calibration. At 86 minutes, it asks little of your time but demands full attention: it is lean, unsparing, and quietly radical in its refusal to flatter the viewer with explanation or relief. Its impact accumulates in the gaps — between shots, between lines, between Orlok’s resignation and Thompson’s blankness. It is not a film you enjoy, but one you absorb, like newsprint smudged with ink you can’t quite wipe off. Those who dismiss it as underdeveloped miss its strategy: it is built to unsettle, not satisfy. Anyone who believes horror films must scare, thrillers must resolve, or debuts must announce genius will leave unconvinced. But if you accept that a film can be both modest and meaningful — that constraint can sharpen rather than dull an idea — then Targets delivers with unnerving precision. Its worth lies not in what it achieves, but in what it refuses: comfort, closure, and the illusion that violence ever makes sense.
