‘Zodiac Killer Project’: A True-Crime Flop Becomes a Documentary Masterpiece

TRICKS OF THE TRADE

“Zodiac Killer Project” chronicles how a true-crime idea went wrong, in turn brilliantly dissecting and skewering the entire genre—and our obsession with it.

'Zodiac Killer Project' by Charlie Shackleton
Courtesy of Sundance Institute

Watch enough true-crime documentaries and patterns begin to emerge—a situation that speaks to the genre’s embrace of a cookie-cutter formula defined by a host of recurring narrative and formal tropes.

Director Charlie Shackleton had intended to follow the same non-fiction route pioneered by his many filmmaking ancestors, but when his movie fell apart, his sole chance to salvage his endeavor was to make Zodiac Killer Project. The film, which premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, is a unique affair in the mold of The Shining-inspired documentary Room 237. Shackleton describes, in incisive detail, the precise way he had planned to realize his now-defunct dream. Amazingly, the result is even better than his initial design: a sharp, hilarious, self-aware, and acutely insightful work of both celebration and critique.

“I’m not saying that, like, having seen a lot of these things is all the training I would have needed to make one, but I do think it would have got me pretty far,” admits Shackleton, whose Zodiac Killer Project is the story of the story he wishes he could have told, and a dissection of a docu-template that’s become all-too-ubiquitous.

Shackleton’s film was going to focus on Lyndon E. Lafferty, a California Highway Patrol officer who became convinced that he’d figured out the identity of San Francisco’s infamous Zodiac killer. Though Shackleton admits he was never a true-crime junkie, reading Lafferty’s book The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge stoked his imagination due to its highly cinematic nature. Thus, he anticipated a feature that would employ a variety of stock devices to bring to life the man’s wild and wide-ranging investigation.

Zodiac Killer Project opens on an empty parking lot, with Shackleton explaining in voiceover that his movie would have begun here, with a dramatic recreation of Shackleton’s first encounter with his suspect George Russell Tucker—a “classic serial killer name,” according to Shackleton, given the media’s fondness for referring to such fiends by their first, middle, and last names.

Shackleton doesn’t actually dramatize the scene; instead, he simply zooms ominously into and out of the frame (and its pedestrian action) as he explicates his intentions and reads from Lafferty’s book, in which the author admits that—spying the supposed madman in the car next to his own—“I knew I was looking into the eyes of death.”

Charlie Shackleton attends the "Zodiac Killer Project" premiere
Charlie Shackleton attends the "Zodiac Killer Project" premiere Cindy Ord/Cindy Ord/Getty Images

Lafferty may have believed he was onto the bust of the century, but Shackleton’s wry commentary indicates that he’s not nearly as sold on the man’s theory. For the director, however, believing his subject is clearly secondary to spinning a gripping yarn. Shackleton’s take on the Zodiac myth fell apart when he lost the rights to Lafferty’s book (for reasons which still elude him). Therefore, in Zodiac Killer Project, he specifies what he had sought to do with Lafferty’s tome while also carefully avoiding any copyright infringement-related infractions that might get him into trouble. This means he can address the sections of Lafferty’s story that are corroborated by secondary sources, but when it comes to the author’s original material, he must glide over it or relay it in vague terms.

From the get-go, Shackleton is an astute and amusing narrator who seamlessly blends storytelling and analysis. At the end of his discussion about the movie’s first scene, he remarks, “F---. It would have been good. And from there, we’d have gone straight into the title sequence, which kind of would have made itself.”

At that point, he delivers a riotously on-point breakdown of the many elements that comprise such introductions: layered imagery involving landscapes and faces; scratchy and disjointed aesthetics; the sight of birds taking flight and shadowy men walking away; country-inflected music. Set to clips of these sequences from numerous high-profile docuseries, it’s a definitive itemization presented with equal parts exasperation (at the lack of creativity exhibited by so many shows) and admiration (for the approach’s reliable effectiveness).

Throughout Zodiac Killer Project, Shackleton takes a scalpel to the true-crime genre by explaining the proposed scaffolding of his own film, why he would have utilized its tried-and-true conventions, and the peaks and pitfalls inherent to such an enterprise—all as he grippingly recounts Lafferty’s winding saga.

A cross between a campfire tale, an instruction manual, and a piece of film criticism, it’s an impressive balancing act which underscores Shackleton’s perspicacity, the suspenseful outrageousness of Lafferty’s inquiry, and the mechanics of the genre. Laying bare the tricks of the trade—and frequently chuckling about them and their artificiality, as when he acknowledges that he’s using a library as a stand-in for a police station—he underlines the means by which directors like himself manipulate, excite, and unnerve. At the same time, though, he uses those tricks to intrigue and enthrall, thereby demonstrating their worth.

While elucidating the nuts and bolts of his own true-crime effort, Shackleton raises the issue of ethicality via asides about The Jinx’s bombshell conclusion and Paradise Lost II: Revelations’ dubious finger-pointing (“If you’re convinced it’s for the greater good, there are very few ethical lines, as far as, like, HBO execs are concerned,” he quips).

From joking that Lafferty’s estate might have denied him the rights to the book because someone else was “promising to make it the next Tiger King or whatever,” to revealing that dramatic-recreation actors are known as “backtors” (since you merely see their backs) and that all those hackneyed insert shots found in true-crime docs are referred to as “evocative B-roll”—which he then proceeds to duplicate, complete with clacking sound cues, to highlight their value—Shackleton leaves no stone unturned. That he does so with a laugh, as when a wheelie-popping biker interrupts one of his scenic panoramas, only makes the proceedings that much more engaging.

Its own three-act structure mirroring the one Shackleton would have used for his unproduced film, Zodiac Killer Project ends with the director confessing that, in the absence of a genuine resolution, he’d have resorted to a variety of storytelling maneuvers to suggest the “chaos of reality” and the “mysteries at the heart of the universe.” As he muses over a shot of waves crashing onto shore at dusk, “It’s funny, you kind of build up the rhythm and the feel of closure, and you almost just get it.” With his daring, shrewd, and altogether entertaining feature, he gets it in spades.