Charlie Shackleton’s Zodiac killer documentary began when his Zodiac killer documentary fell apart. He had planned to adapt a memoir by a police officer who believed he had cracked one of the most infamous unsolved killing sprees. But when the rights fell through, he decided to instead make a movie about the movie he would have made — and Zodiac Killer Project was born.
The film, which premiered Monday at the Sundance film festival, follows Shackleton as he narrates, with considerable wit, a shot-by-shot description of his unmade documentary. Along the way, he exposes a slew of true-crime documentary tricks that filmmakers use to titillate audiences while making them feel in the know.
He exposes the manipulation and sometimes outright fraudulence of the true-crime genre with dry amusement, like a magician not only revealing tricks, but embarrassed by their hackyness.
True Crime Tropes in Zodiac Killer Project
Shackleton proves himself a master of what he calls “evocative B-roll”: crime scene tape, a footprint, blood pooling, a door closing, someone slightly out of focus, perhaps carrying a file. He ponders why interrogation re-enactments in true crime documentaries so often include a swinging overhead light. When he needs an imposing police station, he just uses a library.
Some of the images he concocts — a burning police sketch of the Zodiac suspect, for example — are so powerful that they move you even when you’re fully aware that you’re being manipulated.
He delights in the number of true crime documentaries in which the lead investigators share the same nickname, “the bulldog.” And he addresses very new tropes, like using AI to animate still photos, to create the creepy feeling that we are inside an old image.
Who Is the Zodiac?
Shackleton’s original film would have been based on the 2012 book The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge, by Lyndon E. Lafferty, a former California Highway Patrol officer. The film uses the fake name that Lafferty assigns to the suspect in the book, George Russell Tucker.
While some viewers — eager to do their own online sleuthing — may be disappointed in not knowing the suspect’s true identity, Shackleton makes clear that the identity of the Zodiac Killer isn’t his real interest. He’s investigating a genre.
Because of that, he pointedly declines to do two things: provide the basic boilerplate of the Zodiac case (the mystery killer murdered at least five in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late ’60s), and detail his own credentials.
By not revealing his own background, Shackleton gives the audience the feeling that anyone could do what he’s doing, simply by watching enough true crime docs. It’s similar to the feeling that true-crime documentaries give to armchair detectives at home, flattering them with the notion that just by watching TV, they can pick up on clues that countless bulldog investigators have missed.
“Obviously I’ve never made a true crime film. And it did kind of feel like the familiarity I built up as a viewer was a pretty decent substitute,” Shackleton tells MovieMaker. “Obviously, I have no proof of that. I didn’t actually go through with the thing and make the documentary, so I’d have something to show for myself. And I’m sure people who are experts at putting these things together would doubt that I could so easily have replicated the the formula. But yeah, I mean, it felt intuitive, just from the familiarity I built up as a viewer.”
Though his expertise doesn’t lie in true crime, the British, 33-year-old Shackleton is an acclaimed filmmaker and visual artist who started writing the movie blog Ultra Culture in 2008, when he was 16. Raised by a single mother, he began filming her seizures, as a child, at the urging of doctors trying to treat her.
He is an astute student of genre: His debut film, 2014’s Beyond Clueless, explored ’90s teen movies. One of his other films, The Afterlight, is a meditation on impermanence; it consists of scenes of departed actors from old films, and only a single print exists, which degrades with each screening.
Like those films, Zodiac Killer Project is built around material from previous films — especially the true crime documentaries that Shackleton critiques. The films of Joe Berlinger — whose decades-long career includes the acclaimed Paradise Lost series as well as a string of recent Netflix hits — are referenced repeatedly.
“All of the existing material in the film is used on a fair-use basis,” Shackleton says. “We didn’t seek permission from anyone, which might have been hard to secure … given that I obviously say some unflattering things about other true crime films and TV shows in the film.”
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He notes that he’s a fan of much of Berlinger’s work — particularly the Paradise Lost films, which methodically examine the case of the West Memphis Three — though he feels that the director’s latest Netflix work can feel like part of “basically a production line.”
Prospects for Zodiac Killer Project
Zodiac Killer Project is for sale at Sundance, and Shackleton acknowledges wondering if potential buyers might opt not to buy a film that stops just short of mocking the true crime genre. Netflix and countless others are doing great business with true crime, after all, and might not want to expose the golden goose.
“It did become a bit of a running joke that the more mentions we put into the film of various distributors and streaming services, the less likely it seemed that we were going to find one that we hadn’t slagged off,” he laughs. “But hopefully they’re willing to overlook some light teasing.”
During the editing of Zodiac Killer Project, Shackleton worried that some of his observations about the genre might become obsolete, because true crime might move on from its familiar tricks.
But no.
“I kept thinking that the genre was going to kind of leave the critique behind — that there would be new tropes and new tendencies — maybe some big new hit that would do things differently — and this would all feel a little outdated,” he says.
“To my mind, as someone who throughout the edit kept watching every new Netflix and Amazon and Hulu true crime show and movie, it really felt like those tropes just got more and more bedded in.
“Maybe partly because these things seem to be being made faster and faster. So whatever’s easiest, whatever’s most kind of reliable, just gets lent upon. Right until the the very late stages of the edit, I was having lots of opportunities to drop new examples into the montages — then the latest show would use exactly the same bit of B-roll that we’d already found in seven other shows.”
Zodiac Killer Project is now playing at Sundance.