Between December 1968 and October 1969, a series of brutal murders were committed in the San Francisco Bay area. These five deaths were never solved but were committed by a person who identified themselves in letters to newspapers as Zodiac. Police were baffled and the public was transfixed by the crimes which remain unsolved to this day. Needless to say, the killings have found their way into the cultural zeitgeist as numerous books promulgating various theories about the slayings were published. Clint Eastwood hunted down a very Zodiac-like killer in director Don Siegel’s 1971 film Dirty Harry. Three and a half decades later, director David Fincher would come full circle by adapting the first of the Zodiac Killer books, taking on the hunt for the killer directly in his film Zodiac.
Charlie Shackleton is another filmmaker who found themselves fascinated by the subject and commenced plans to craft a documentary out of the 2012 book The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up, aka The Silenced Badge by Lyndon Lafferty. In it, a California policeman tells his story of a chance encounter with someone he thought could be Zodiac and his subsequent investigations, both official and unofficial. However, when the author’s family suddenly withdrew from negotiations with Shackleton over the film rights to the book, the director refused to let all the work he had already done to prepare for the film shoot to go to waste. The end result is the documentary Zodiac Killer Project, a fascinating and clever film in which Shackleton walks us though the process of what his planned film would have looked like while giving us a unique view into the documentary form itself.
But as Zodiac Killer Project tells us story of one man’s ultimately doomed hunt for the infamous serial killer, it also serves as a critique of the current spate of serial killer documentaries and true crime series that can be seen on cable and streaming outlets. Shackleton talks through what his documentary would have been, drawing comparisons to how a number of other films have hit similar visual and storytelling beats in their own narratives. He notes how the title sequence for his film would have followed familiar tropes used on other similar projects. Locations where he would have shot reenactments are visited as he explains in voice-over how they would have composed the action for that footage. He notes where the use of 1950s home movies would serve as shorthand to describe the idyllic environment that Zodiac may have grown up. But then he suggests you can strike ominous tone by having a local resident describing the town as having a “dark underbelly.” (A truth that David Lynch had tapped into decades earlier with Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks.) The deconstruction grows to the point of ridiculousness when we get to the laugh out loud moment of a number of law enforcement offices in different documentaries all state that their – most likely self-appointed – nickname is “the Bulldog.”
In doing all this, Zodiac Killer Project casts light on the artifice behind these types of films. Shackleton notes a moment in his own planned documentary where a specific moment between Lafferty and his suspect would have been played for the suspense, explaining exactly what narrative cinematic techniques he would use to create that within the film. It raises the question about the proper balance between journalism and cinematic storytelling within the genre’s films and television series. And by doing so he challenges his audience to take what he is showing about how this sausage is made and to apply it to other films of this type and judge for themselves their veracity.
