Is That What I Was Afraid of?

"Is that what I was afraid of?" These are the words uttered by Byron Orlok (played by Boris Karloff) as he takes down the mass murderer who has terrorized Los Angeles. This statement resonates in your head after you have viewed the movie Targets. The movie, made in 1968, which features an insurance agent who goes on a shooting rampage through Los Angeles was extremely disturbing in 1968 and is still disturbing and disturbingly relevant 40 years later. The movie is loosely based on the University of Texas sniper, Charles Whitman, who murdered his victims from a campus tower. In the last couple years we have seen snipers targeting innocent civilians on the roadways in Columbus and Maryland, as well as campus shootings at Virginia Tech and Eastern Illinois University. It's really unbelievable how the movie carries the same relevance in 2008 as it did in 1968.

What makes the movie so terrifying is the persona of the killer. When I first saw the main character is thought the actor playing him was Ron Howard (Richie Cunningham in Happy Days). The reason I say that, is because he just looks like the All-American boy. He has the good looks, a nice wife, and a nice family. He is respectful to his family (calls his father Sir) and drives the All-American muscle car, the Ford Mustang. However, there is one very disturbing thing we find out very early in the film. He has an arsenal in the trunk of his car fit for a small army. From the beginning we know that everyting is not as it seems with this guy and something awful is going to happen.

There is an interesting paralel going on in the movie with the killer and Byron Orlok. Orlok is a frustrated and tired old actor. He feels outdated and useless. He has played the monster in horror films his whole career and now feels the times have passed him by. He feels today's culture no longer finds his characters scary. He references a newspaper article chronicling a killing spree and asks how he can he compete with that? He makes an excellent point. His audience now has been subjected to more violence and what is necessary to scare them has escalated. Byron believes that him playing a mummy or vampire no longer has the effect on the audience that it once did, when the audience is reading about mass murderers and such in the papers. We see the two stories of the killer and Byron playing out simulataneously until they cross paths in the final scene.

In the final scene at the drive-in theater, after the killer has accumulated numerous victims, Orlok takes down the killer as he becomes disoriented seeing Orlok approaching him and Orlok also on the movie screen. Orlok is genuinely afraid as he has seen many people shot including his secretary. After he apprehends the killer and he is being carried away he sees this normal looking clean cut young man and asks, "Is this what I was afraid of?" He can't believe that this All-American boy could cause so much fear and destruction. This is what makes the film so terrifying. Anyone could be capable of going on a shooting spree. You could have a killer like this living next door. What also makes this movie disgusting is the nonchalance and lack of remorse that the killer shows. He really is deranged and numb to what he's done. He best exemplifies this when he tells the officers, "I hardly missed, didn't I?" He has no regard for human life.

This film does not meet Carroll's definition of a horror film. It falls more in the category of "art-dread." The movie lacks a true disgusting monster.The killer, no matter how disgusting we find him, is not a disturbance to the natural order. Even though the movie doesn't fit into Carroll's genre of horror, it still manages to send a chill down your spine.