“Draining the Genre” | Zodiac Killer Project Is An Autopsy of True Crime Docs
Zodiac Killer Project was born from a thwarted attempt to make a straightforward true-crime documentary based on The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge by Lyndon E. Lafferty, one of the many, many published attempts to detangle the case of the Zodiac Killer’s identity.
Writer/director Charlie Shackleton tells us in voiceover about the movie he would have made if he’d managed to strike a successful deal with Lafferty’s estate. The deal fell through and he wasn’t able to secure the rights to the book; instead of scrapping the project, Shackleton flipped his movie inside out, making a documentary about the documentary he would have made if he’d managed to secure the rights. The resulting project is a self-reflexive examination of the true crime genre, of the “gravitational pull” (as Shackleton puts it) drawing him toward stories about crime and justice, and of his own motivations in wanting to recount the details of a story that’s already been picked apart many times over.
Shackleton avoids those sordid details in this iteration of his project; we’ve heard about the Zodiac murders enough. Drain the truecrime story of its actual crime, and what you’re left with is the desire to pick apart the motivation to tell the story in the first place. Zodiac Killer Project is less a true crime story than an autopsy of true crime documentary as a whole, with Shackleton discussing the techniques he’d have used if he had been able to make the movie he’d set out to make in the first place, playfully juxtaposing side-by-side comparisons of credit sequences and ominous B-roll against each other. His dryly humorous voiceover narrates the scenes he’d have reenacted, an extra layer of meta-commentary protecting him from possible copyright infringement as he dissects passages from the source material he doesn’t actually have the rights to. In so doing, he builds a case against a genre of filmmaking he clearly has a lot of affection for.
Read Charlie Shackleton’s answers to the CCFF Filmmaker Questionnaire.
Zodiac Killer Project has been compared to Jafar Panahi’s This Is Not a Film, in which Panahi, under house arrest, explains the bones of the movie he’d be making at that moment had he not been prevented from doing so by the Iranian government. The comparisons make sense—both films are meta-commentaries on the nature of documentary filmmaking—but aside from their bare-bones similarities, the two films are worlds apart. This Is Not a Film depicts the human need to tell stories; Zodiac Killer Project suggests that, perhaps, not every story needs to be told over and over again. There’s the question of imposing a dramatized narrative on events that don’t deserve the time or the intention. Shackleton goes so far as to suggest that “consumers” of true crime need to be convinced of the seriousness of the crime before they’ve even heard the evidence in favor of some guilty charge; they need to push their way into some version of “the truth” that they can impose upon their world.
Not that Shackleton condemns any true crime fans for their interests; he’s a fan too, and his movie is also an opportunity for him to interrogate himself as part of the in-group in question. He pushes his own way into a retelling of a serial killer, imposing himself on the book he’d been unable to gain the rights to. He also imposes himself on the California landscapes the Zodiac Killer once stalked, slowly panning his way across some location he’d have filmed if he’d been making the documentary, then stopping to zoom in on some infinitely small point, slow and hypnotic, simultaneously the center of the universe and somehow a dispassionate observer outside it. Is the true crime genre worth investing time and energy in? Did Lafferty find the Zodiac Killer? Will Zodiac Killer Project provide definitive answers? You’ll have to go on the ride with Shackleton yourself to know for sure.
Zodiac Killer Project screens Wednesday, May 7, at 9:30 p.m. at the Music Box Theatre as part of the Chicago Critics Film Festival (May 2–8). Get your tickets now.
Sarah Welch-Larson is a film critic who writes at the intersection of feminist theory and theology, sad men in space, and stories about agency, creation, and androids. That culminates in delightful fashion in her book, Becoming Alien: The Beginning and End of Evil in Science Fiction’s Most Idiosyncratic Franchise where she takes the “fractured franchise” and binds them together through reading their explorations of the concept of evil through the lens of Catherine Keller’s cosmology. She’s a staff writer for Bright Wall/Dark Room and a co-writer of the Seeing & Believing newsletter (formerly a long-running podcast), with her writing appearing elsewhere at RogerEbert.com, Tor.com, and Think Christian. Follow Sarah at Letterboxd and Instagram.
