I’ve posted this elsewhere but I’m gonna post this here for your general perusal!
August 15th, 1968, just a couple of months before Lake Herman, Peter Bogdanovich released his first movie Targets. It was clearly designed to be a limited budget thriller aimed at the drive in theater crowd, however Bogdanovich showed his promise and the movie is elevated for the genre, in my opinion. It’s stylish, surprising, and interesting.
The plot was based on a true story of a California serial murder from what I recall. Apparently a guy opened fired on a California freeway and killed several people. In the movie, a young guy comes back from Vietnam to live in the San Fernando Valley. He lives with his family and wife. It seems normal but the movie conveys the seething anger he has inside. You can tell he hates his family and, after given a sexual brush off from his wife, he murders them and goes on a killing rampage, ending up in a drive in theater shooting people in cars.
There are several .. well .. very notable parts of this film in connection with Z. First off, I’ll attach a link to the trailer and the movie poster, but there is a very specific scene in the beginning where the guy goes in and specifically buys Super X bullets. It’s in the trailer around the 30 second mark. Next, you can see on the poster itself are crosshairs. There are lots of crosshairs in the movie. It has several scenes looking through the scope where it is black with just a round circle of the scene and crosshairs over it. Later, there is a stand out scene in which the killer writes a type written letter about the killing and that he’s gonna keep doing it until he gets caught. There follows a scene about stories in the newspaper about killings. In the end, the guy gets caught because a) he doesn’t have a light on his rifle so he can’t shoot people in cars without lights on because it’s too dark inside them and b) he leaves the scene of a shooting with squealing tires – both things familiar from a Z letter.
Above all, the thing that stands out to me about the movie is that the killings the guy participates in do not seem personal. He’s not mad at the people. It feels a lot like Z to me.
I don’t know if this was part of the inspiration or not or even if it matters if it was but check it out and let me know what you think! The movie is rentable at Amazon Prime among others. I would love for some knowledgeable Z people to watch the full film and give their impressions.
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Yep, I see what you mean. This may very well have been a movie that inspired Zodiac in some way. If not, it’s another uncanny coincidence.
