Imagine you’re at a friend of a friend’s Halloween party. You wander around meeting people and encounter the familiar characters: Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, a witch, a werewolf, a mummy, all in varying degrees of comedy and sensuality. Now imagine you meet a man dressed in standard late-70s attire with few distinguishing features. You ask the innocuous “Who are you?” and he replies, “Ted Bundy.” What is your reaction? Unsettled? Perhaps the discomfort is multiplied, given the pleasant interactions leading up to this one?

Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets asks you to examine this contrast. It juxtaposes references to Boris Karloff’s real-life roles—the mummies, vampires, wolfmen, etc. of Old Hollywood—to a new kind of monster with which the American public was just coming to terms. These old monsters have meaning and mythologies associated with them. Their violence is the consequence of tangible actions and decisions—a spell is read, a curse is cast, a bite is inflicted.

The modern monster of the film has none of these traits. Outside of a vague allusion to Vietnam service, he’s a happily-married man in his 20’s from a well-off family whose sole reason for his eventual killing spree is, “I get funny ideas.” In the face of the latter, the former monster is rendered silly, not scary, or, as the film bluntly states, “campy.” The victims of the former are generally complicit in the action, i.e. have opened Pandora’s box in some way, whereas the victims of the latter have no inclination as to what’s happening to them, no agency or ability to fight back.

That latter monster, Bobby Thompson in the film, is the personification of real anxieties of the 1960’s. The most direct source is Charles Whitman, the Texas Tower Sniper, but I also choose to believe the director was indulging in some pointed irony in casting a JFK-lookalike as his sharpshooter. Perhaps what’s most prophetic about the film is its understanding of the new kind of monster that would dominate the American consciousness in the coming decades: serial killers with no clear motive that defy all notions of cause and effect, and subvert the supposed natural order of things.

What’s perhaps most interesting about the film is the depiction of Thompson’s family unit, comprising of a stern father who’s generally caring but demands to be called “sir,” an overly affectionate mother, and an aloof wife who ignores his mild attempt to talk through his murderous urges (now that I type this out, I see an obvious Freudian cocktail forming). What’s striking is how boring each interaction between the family members is, how they constantly speak past each other—surface-level inquiries into Bobby’s dull insurance job, mild chauvinistic complaints about the wives, nagging mentions about an upcoming neighborhood event, all underscored with audio from the living room television which drones in the background through their dinner and into the night, and serves, apart from target practice, as the family’s only form of entertainment. You start to wonder if the emptiness of bourgeois life is what really drives Bobby insane. (Jim Carrey’s exasperated cry as his fictional wife reads off ad copy in The Truman Show comes to mind: What the hell are you talking about? Who are you talking to?! Additionally consider that Truman is also an insurance salesman, a job that denotes by its mere existence a great societal failure.)

If one is constantly inundated with things that don’t matter, how far is the stretch to an understanding of the world where nothing and no one matters? And, as the film asks, what’s the logical endpoint of that belief? As Karloff asks in the film’s climax, is that what you’re really afraid of?