Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [24]
Bogdanovich paralleled this fake horror with the real kind: a blond, blue-eyed sniper who kills for no reason. His murders are random and passionless. He buys bullets like other people buy socks. And when he guns down his victims, he doesn’t even smile. He goes through the process of his terrible murders, but while the movie closely tracks this character, he remains oddly remote. The narratives of the young killer and the old actor alternate for most of the movie before they intersect at a drive-in theater where Orlok has come to introduce one of his movies. The sniper fires from behind the screen, and Bogdanovich puts the camera in the perspective of the killer. The audience sees the victims through the target. By having them in the crosshairs, the movie puts us in the position of the gun.
The shooter picks off one audience member after another, sitting in their cars, ignorant of the horror surrounding them. It was a metaphor of alienation and the ways that moviegoing can dull the senses. Stuck in their own cars, separated from one another, the audience is the ultimate monster. They cheer the violence on-screen, overlooking what is going on right next to them. And the beauty of this killing, the ping of the gun and the pop of the windows breaking, makes it even more palatable. The gore is kept minimal. Targets was an attack on horror as harsh as anything from Fredric Wertham, suggesting that horror movies disentangle moral questions from acts of violence. In an insightful essay in The New York Times, Renata Adler called the movie “perhaps the most film-critical film ever made.”
Each of the major horror movies of the summer of 1968 was a response to the Old Horror. Rosemary’s Baby rejected it; Night of the Living Dead paid homage. But Targets did something that seemed a little rarefied: it provided a eulogy. It had an artificial quality that bothered critics who seemed to judge the film by the standards of a piece of realism. “Why?” Howard Thompson began his mostly favorable review in The New York Times. “The invariable question of today’s headlines about the random sniper-murder of innocent people is never answered in ‘Targets.’ This is the only flaw, and a serious one.” But why does it need to be answered? The movie wasn’t attempting to explain the killer. The horror of the murders was, in part, their randomness.
Penelope Gilliatt was even tougher in The New Yorker, arguing that by keeping the character oblique, the movie encouraged a kind of sadism. “It seems to me a fantastically foolish picture,” she writes. “How intellectually chaotic to make a gun-control parable that is so empty of any sense of the people in it that the only response left to an audience is to recline with a bag of popcorn and lust after a manly score of assassinations.” Neither of these reviews considered the lack of motivation as an intentional choice. They missed what became one of the most important philosophical ideas of the decade in horror film. Being in the dark about evil: that is the real horror.
CHAPTER THREE
BLOOD BROTHERS
Last week was my birthday. Nobody even said “Happy Birthday” to me. Someday this tape will be played and then they’ll feel sorry.
Pinback, Dark Star
IF YOU wanted to direct horror movies in the late sixties, you could borrow money from your family and friends; beg an independent company to give you a shot; or hope to win the lottery in the studio system. But you almost certainly did not apply to film school. The