Zodiac Killer Project

Charlie Shackleton’s wry documentary explores the true crime film he tried – and failed – to make about the unsolved case of the Zodiac serial killer.

Former patrol cop Lyndon Lafferty believed he had cracked the long-unsolved Zodiac case about a serial killer who went on a murder spree in San Francisco in the late 1960s. When director Charlie Shackleton came upon Lafferty’s memoir detailing his decades-long quest to unmask the killer, he set about adapting it only to have the project unexpectedly fall through.

Taking his failed film as a starting point, Shackleton deconstructs the scenes he had mapped out and comments on the clichés and tropes of true crime documentaries that he could have used – a literal smoking gun, bullet casings falling in slow-motion to the ground, a shadowy figure at a typewriter. The result is an entertaining investigation into the ever-popular genre. You’ll never look at a true crime documentary again without hearing Shackleton’s deadpan commentary on ‘the evocative B-roll'.