Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [23]
Of course he was. Still, this was a puzzle with major obstacles. The Terror, for starters, was one of the most laughable films of all time, mostly notable for its incoherence and the most terrible performance of Jack Nicholson’s career. “I remember thinking that Nicholson was a bad actor because of that movie,” Bogdanovich says. Mostly, though, there was the problem of the star. Corman underpaid Karloff on The Terror, and when his agent complained, he renegotiated, on the condition that he would get two more days of work from the star. Karloff was the most famous horror actor working. But for Bogdanovich, that was a mark against him. Karloff represented the cobwebs of a spooky castle, cheap advertising campaigns, the lurching monster—in other words, the Old Horror. He was reaching the end of a long career with two bad knees and a long, wrinkly face far too familiar to shock anyone.
Although best known as the wordless monster in Frankenstein, Karloff’s greatest gift as a performer was his baritone, refined after years in radio and on Broadway. As his body deteriorated, he was introduced to young fans in the sixties as the voice of the title character in the cartoon of Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas and the host for the television series Thriller. This voice work kept him employed, but it also emphasized how dated his brand of scares was. He sounded spooky, but when the camera pointed toward Karloff, he looked like a dignified, elderly gentleman who had begun to waste away. How would that scare anyone?
“Corman kept focusing on Karloff being a horror character, a scary figure,” Bogdanovich says, sitting in a hotel in Los Angeles. “But he was just an old man, and he didn’t seem very scary to me.” No horror star did. Most of them were either dying (Lon Chaney, Boris Karloff) or fading in popularity (Vincent Price, Peter Cushing). Their day had passed. New Horror would belong to the director, and his challenge, as Bogdanovich saw it, was to figure out how to make an obsolete genre, one that no self-respecting cineaste had any interest in, relevant. Bogdanovich asked himself: “What is modern horror?”
Targets begins with a self-conscious joke, a long clip of The Terror that showcases the trappings of Victorian horror: a bat, a castle, and a spooky knock at the door. After over three minutes of this film playing during the credit sequence, the screen goes black, and the camera pans to the grim, beaten-down face of a bespectacled Boris Karloff, neatly attired in a formal suit. As Byron Orlok—named for the vampire in Nosferatu, the kind of film reference that pleased Bogdanovich—he flashed a look of someone with too much dignity for this job. An aging stage actor, he sighs. Orlok has become the scariest thing possible in Hollywood—out of date.
With this clever opening scene, Bogdanovich, who plays a young director trying to break into the business, found the solution to the problem of how to use Karloff without making a cheesy B-picture. Bogdanovich made a horror movie about the death of horror movies. He took all the elements of the Corman horror movies and reversed them. Corman told his actors and crew that he never wanted to see “reality.” The acting should be larger than life and the design always out of the ordinary. Bogdanovich made a rigorously naturalistic horror movie. Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations (usually starring Vincent Price) used pop psychology. Bogdanovich wanted to make a movie about a killer with no inner life. And he would do it by making Karloff, the greatest monster in Old Horror, the hero.
Orlok retires, leaving the young director without a star (he threatens to replace him with Vincent Price). “I feel like a dinosaur,” Karloff’s