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The Horror Pod Class Episode 127: Targets

Tyler: Welcome to Episode 127 of the Horror Pod Class. My name is Tyler Unsell and by day I am a just an ordinary teacher but by night I transform to an ordinary teacher who likes to talk about spooky shit. I am joined tonight as I am most nights by The cohostest with the mostest. The snazziest skeleton I know…Orrin Grey. What have you been up to since we last appeared here man?

Tyler: Tonight we are going to discuss what we have been reading and watching, highlight some free content on the internet with our dark corner of the web and finally we are headed out to the drive in to examine the mass shooter movie Targets. 

What are we watching:

Tyler: Mondo Book! Warped and Faded Weird Wednesday and the Birth of The American Genre film Archive. The Final Girl Support Group Grady Hendrix

Orrin: I recently saw the new Candyman, which was great, and I’m looking forward to catching Malignant. I’m putting the finishing touches on the table of contents for my next collection, but it won’t be out until, like, this time next year.

Dark Corners of the Web:  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXlKPf7F4BE

Essential Question: Why do so many horror movie villains steer away from guns? 

An elderly horror film star, while making a personal appearance at a drive-in theatre, confronts a psychotic Vietnam War veteran who has turned into a mass-murdering sniper.

Top cast

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Tim O'Kelly

Tim O’Kelly

Boris Karloff

Boris Karloff

Arthur Peterson

Arthur Peterson

Monte Landis

Nancy Hsueh

Nancy Hsueh

Peter Bogdanovich

Peter Bogdanovich

Daniel Ades

Stafford Morgan

Stafford Morgan

James Brown

James Brown

Mary Jackson

Mary Jackson

Tanya Morgan

Timothy Burns

Warren White

Mark Dennis

Sandy Baron

Sandy Baron

Geraldine Baron

Gary Kent

Gary Kent

Ellie Wood Walker

Joe Dante on TARGETS

This whole movie feels like a kissing cousin of that story you read at the Weird Symposium. Where can everyone find that story?

That story was definitely heavily influenced by this movie, and it’s available to read for free at The Dark: http://www.thedarkmagazine.com/night-horror-show/

“Targets” – An Introduction by Peter Bogdanovich-An Absolutely stunning Doc on the topic

Phenomena of the wimpy white boy. 

Interesting analysis about mass shootings and horror movies.

https://www.tor.com/2017/10/11/targets-horror-movies-in-the-age-of-mass-shootings/

HOLY SHIT. Is it that Mass shootings aren’t horror movies because they are TOO normal. Thats fucked. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-haunting-normalcy-of-mass-shootings

This has nothing to do with anything but its Charming as Fuck.

So, my whole thing with this movie, which we will definitely talk about somewhere, is that it is a movie about the way movies, and specifically horror movies, were changing from the golden age of Hollywood into the post-Vietnam era. It’s a subject I’ve written about often, most recently at Nightmare Mag earlier this year (http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/the-h-word-victims-and-volunteers/).

Essentially, this is a movie about a remnant of a Gothic horror past (Boris Karloff, basically playing himself) confronting the much more banal horror of post-Vietnam modernity.

The Note. Dude the Note

4 Movies

Tyler: The Hunt, We Need to Talk About Kevin (Non Horror Blue Caprice

Orrin: Spider Baby, Anguish

ALU

First off, this app fucking sucks. No one who uses this shit site knows how to review movies. They just spew words. This movie is boring. It’s talky. It’s not a movie. It’s hardly a play. No one does anything interesting and there aren’t any interesting scenes. Not a single aspect of this movie is unique. Visually, it’s unambitious. I could close my eyes and wouldn’t miss basically anything. The slow pushes are… gay, hack, expected. The cuts are meaningless. Peter Bogdanovich writing clever lines for himself and giving himself a hot Chinese girlfriend is embarrassing. It’s depressing, it’s not fun to look at, its premise is only slightly clever. Boris Karloff is good, but this movie is kiddie stuff. He’s old, crotchety, tired, depressed, sick of it, alcoholic. Wow. Amazing. He just sits in chairs and talks.Nothing happens. He kills his wife, his mom. Big whoop. I’ve seen it before a thousand times.

Next Time: Malignant.