Targets

Roger Corman told director Peter Bogdanovich that he could make any film that he wanted to, on two conditions: he had to use stock footage from the film The Terror (1963), and he had to hire Boris Karloff for two days (Karloff was under contract to Corman and owed him those two days). Karloff was so impressed with the film's script, however, that he refused any pay for any shooting time over his contracted two days. He worked for a total of five days on it.

(at around 1h 28 mins) The drive-in theater is empty except for the killer's car. This is illogical, since the victims' cars should be there, too. After a massacre like that, there would still be a lot of crime scene personnel and a police guard watch.

The film's original theatrical prints began with a written title card that read, "Why gun control? Why did a lunatic sniper kill or maim 11 innocent victims in Texas on June 3, 1966? Why were over 7,000 Americans slain or wounded by gunfire in 1967? Why in 1968 after assassinations and thousands of more murders has our country no effective gun control law? This motion picture tells a story that sheds a little light on a very dark and a very deep topic." This title card was added by Paramount Pictures only as a result of the then-recent assassinations of both Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, but it was not approved by the film's director, Peter Bogdanovich at all and, as a result of this, it was removed from all later releases of the film, including those for home video.

The film was cut for a "GP" rating only once, mainly for a 1971 re-release of it in order to capitalize on the success of Peter Bogdanovich's then-recent hit film, The Last Picture Show (1971). Later releases of it on home video were all uncut.