Tagged: Boris Karloff
Targets: Boris Karloff in Tweed
Boris Karloff as Byron Orlok in Targets (1968)
Vitals
Boris Karloff as Byron Orlok, aging horror actor
Los Angeles, Summer 1967
Film: Targets
Release Date: August 15, 1968
Director: Peter Bogdanovich
Production and Costume Design: Polly Platt
WARNING! Spoilers ahead!
Background
“Everybody’s dead… I feel like a dinosaur,” former horror icon Byron Orlok describes himself in a candid moment with Sammy Michaels (Peter Bogdanovich), an ambitious director and screenwriter played by Targets‘ own director and co-writer himself. Bogdanovich had written Orlok as a thinly disguised version of Boris Karloff, the elder statesman of horror cinema who was pushing 80 at the time of the film’s production. An embittered Byron shares with Sammy that his old-fashioned cinematic monsters—i.e. Frankenstein’s monster—are hardly the stuff to scare contemporary audiences as the local news horrifying enough with tales of senseless murder and random violence.