The following notes on Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets were co-written by Garrett Strpko and Josh Martin, PhD candidates in the Department of Communication Arts at UW – Madison. A 35mm print of Targets screens at the Cinematheque on Saturday, October 4, 7 p.m., in the Cinematheque’s regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave. Admission is free!
By Garrett Strpko & Josh Martin
Throughout the early 1970s, the career of critic-turned-director Peter Bogdanovich would soar to astonishing heights, thanks to canonical classics like The Last Picture Show (1971) and Paper Moon (1974). Yet before Bogdanovich joined New Hollywood’s auteur A-list, he debuted with a bracing picture, singular in his oeuvre: 1968’s Targets. The film emerged from Bogdanovich’s partnership with producer Roger Corman, who offered the critic a chance to direct following some uncredited work on 1966’s The Wild Angels. However, the terms of this offer were slightly idiosyncratic. As Bogdanovich recalled, Corman “said, ‘Look, Boris Karloff made a picture with me called The Terror, and part of the deal is he still owes me two days. Here’s what I want you to do: Shoot with Karloff for two days. Get about twenty minutes of footage. Then take about twenty minutes of Karloff out of The Terror. Then shoot another forty minutes with some other actors, put it all together, and I’ll have a new Karloff picture!’”
Starting from this convoluted constellation of entrepreneurial circumstances—a savvy proposition intended to tie up the loose ends of an old deal—Bogdanovich crafted an unlikely masterpiece of low-budget innovation. Targets fittingly begins with this recycled footage from The Terror; however, in the diegetic world of the film, the footage serves as the latest work from young director Sammy Michaels (Bogdanovich). In a studio screening room, Bogdanovich introduces viewers to a weary, graying Karloff, a famed horror star now contemplating his aging screen image. For Karloff, Targets would be a swan song of sorts: he died at the age of 81 in 1969, less than a year after the release of Bogdanovich’s debut. As Byron Orlok, Karloff indulges a thinly veiled riff on his persona. He begins the film by announcing his intention to retire, much to the chagrin of his coterie of dependent colleagues. “I’m an antique!” Orlok exclaims to a desperate Sammy, who clings to Byron for his perceived bankability as the star of his next film. As the veteran actor laments that the world has passed him by, Bogdanovich abruptly cuts to a more horrifying image: Orlok’s face in the crosshairs of a sniper’s scope. Across this boulevard in Los Angeles, Bobby Thompson (Tim O’Kelly) is buying a rifle, and as he tests out the view, the actor happens to be the closest target around.
From the moment that Bobby sets his rifle’s sights on Orlok, Targets announces itself as a very different kind of movie. In this story of two worlds—that of a fading actor and a disturbed young man—the specter of violence encroaches suddenly and indifferently. “Would it work to tell the two stories so independently of each other?” Bogdanovich mused. “I always thought it would because audiences have seen enough movies that they would just know the two of them would meet.” Targets thus follows Bobby and Byron on their separate journeys, crosscutting until those paths converge again at a drive-in theater. The two narrative trajectories could not contrast more sharply in tone. In a joyful extended hangout, Byron and Sammy get drunk and watch Howard Hawks’ The Criminal Code (1931) on television, with the latter lamenting that they just don’t make ‘em like they used to. While Byron and Sammy reminisce, Bobby is preparing for a massacre, killing his wife and mother before setting up for target practice on the side of a highway.
Of course, the perpetual potency of Targets is largely due to its status as a film about the scourge of gun violence. On August 1, 1966, former Marine Charles Whitman opened fire on random victims from the central tower at the University of Texas at Austin, killing fifteen people. The horrific act of violence—the deadliest mass shooting in US history at that point—was widely understood at the time as a unique, nearly unprecedented tragedy, and the incident formed the basis of a number of filmic, television, and literary works in the years that followed, Targets among them. In 2025, such occurrences feel disturbingly more common. Whitman’s massacre is now only the twelfth-deadliest mass shooting. Bogdanovich’s debut thus remains horrifically relevant: director Quentin Tarantino wrote in 2020 that, decades after release, Targets is “still one of the strongest cries for gun control in American cinema.” Indeed, Bobby’s massacre is undoubtedly facilitated by the ease with which he can walk into a gun store and purchase a small army’s worth of firearms and ammunition, something still possible in many states across the country.
Bobby is presented as an ordinary young man: a resident of LA’s San Fernando Valley, he is a paragon of white suburban domesticity, cheerfully snacking on candy bars while cruising the freeways in his convertible. But disturbing hints emerge. Viewers see a photo of Bobby in Army fatigues, suggesting that he may be a troubled veteran. “I get funny ideas,” Bobby confesses to his wife, a call for help that falls on deaf ears. “I just wanted to convey that the boy is an outgrowth of this kind of society,” Bogdanovich stated, positioning Bobby as a product of the “sterility” the director attributed to these LA homes. Although we are given little insight into Bobby’s motivations, little about his demeanor would seem to indicate his disdain for the plain, vanilla world he inhabits with his family—quite the opposite. The care with which he manipulates—no, stages—the bodies of his wife and mother suggests a perverse form of preservation. Paradoxically, Bobby’s reign of terror seems less motivated by a desire to destroy the vestiges of mainstream American culture, but perhaps instead to keep things as they are, to preserve them against the forces of time represented by hotshot hipster film directors and smooth-talking DJs like Kip Larkin (Sandy Baron). The French film theorist André Bazin argued that the desire to photograph stemmed from a “mummy complex” at the heart of human existence: a need to preserve things as they appear in the instant of pressing the shutter—or, in Bobby’s case, pulling the trigger.
The dualistic structure of Bobby and Orlok’s stories is also only the first of the parallels the film draws between gun violence and cinema itself: shooting a rifle versus shooting a movie (consider the surfeit of shots during Bobby’s killing spree filmed from the sniper’s point-of-view), the New Hollywood and its “realistic” horrors of gun violence versus the Old Hollywood’s flights of fancy, and a final scene where the projected image on the screen “shoots back” at the audience. This is not to say that Bogdanovich trivializes either by reducing them to one and the same thing. Rather, the contrast works to reveal contradiction and conflict in the shifts American culture experienced in the late 1960s. Thus, The Terror can only be brought to an end by The Mummy himself. Tarantino’s affection for the film, as evidenced by his critical appreciation, is unsurprising: the influence of Targets’ unusual fusion of showbiz saga and deadly, real-world violence is plenty clear in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019), the director’s revisionist reconfiguration of Hollywood’s encounter with the murderous Manson family. As Bobby and Orlok converge in Reseda, Targets reaches a similarly charged conclusion, with a movie monster thwarting the cinematic avatar of a real contemporary threat. “One critic made an interesting point,” Bogdanovich noted, “He thought that it was my way over saying that art would triumph over reality.” Triumph Orlok might, but the chill of this terror never really goes away. “Hardly ever missed, did I?” Bobby quips to a police officer, a final reminder of the bodies he has left in his wake—and that streak of inexplicable, nihilistic cruelty that even the movies might be powerless to stop.