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ZODIAC KILLER PROJECT

(The 2025 Sundance Film Festival runs January 23- February 2 in and around gorgeous Park City, UT. HtN has you covered for all the hottest titles like Don Lewis’s Zodiac Killer Project movie review. Seen it? Join the conversation with HtN on our Letterboxd Page.)

If you’ve ever tried to make a documentary, you’ve probably run into several unexpected issues. Maybe your subject is at first gung-ho but then becomes reticent and has second thoughts. Perhaps you start trying to unravel sticky story points and are met with no help or dead-end leads. Plus, there’s always the issue of money, time and energy. While in many ways putting together a documentary film of any length has its advantages in terms of a somewhat more immediate plan of action, less crew and more individual control, the documentary filmmaking road has many, many setbacks.

Filmmaker Charlie Shackleton can tell you all about setbacks. As his doc Zodiac Killer Project opens, it’s a bit unclear what is happening as a voice narrates an intense parking lot encounter between two men that happened in the somewhat distant past. The camera lingers on a simple parking space off a Northern California freeway and via the onscreen narration, a story unfolds wherein two men stare at one another before going on their way, one of them forever changed from the brief encounter. The narrator has a bit of a foreign accent, perhaps British and as he tells this story, a more personal point of view comes into play, one where he explains how he would have shot the scene we’re actually seeing, sans the two men. It’s a bit confusing but soon, we get the gist that this isn’t really going to be a standard true crime doc. Rather, Zodiac Killer Project is a meta examination by way of castigation of the true crime doc industry as Shackleton explains how his planned project, based off the semi-popular book Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge by Lyndon E. Rafferty, completely fell apart.

 

For reasons unclear to him, at the last minute the remaining family members of Rafferty’s estate decided they didn’t want to give Shackleton the rights to the book. Since the book was ostensibly the roadmap for the entire story and thus the adaptation he had planned to make, Shackleton no longer has a movie. But…what if he did get to make his movie? What would it have looked like? How would he have done it? In a fairly experimental almost mockumentary way, Zodiac Killer Project becomes a film about the film Shackleton would have made had he not lost the rights to the subjects story. It’s a clever, mischievous and honestly a bit dickish (in a very punk rock/”eff you” kind of way) doc that manages to tell a true crime story as well as a how-to story on true crime doc filmmaking.

 

Clearly a fan on the now ubiquitous true crime documentary genre, Shackleton knows the ins and the outs of how they almost always come off. This is done hilariously as he points out various rather dubious insert shots, editing tricks and sound cues in popular modern true crime films and series. Yet he also realizes that there’s money in them thar docs as people simply cannot get enough of them on each and every streaming service. And as Zodiac Killer Project unspools, viewers follow the Rafferty story about a chance encounter with a man he firmly believes is the Zodiac Killer and the insanely entertaining ways he tries to bring this man to justice. It really could have been a cool doc!

 

Along the way we realize that Shackleton is at once extremely pissed his shot at making a surefire success true crime doc has been ruined but, he also wonders if there was ever really any point in making it at all. Sort of the true question every creative must face when hit with a seemingly unsurmountable challenge.

 

All in all Zodiac Killer Project is very clever. It gets at all sorts of intriguing questions in terms of creativity, media consumption, doc filmmaking, obsession and more. While no clear answers are given, the film is fun and is carried along by the main Lafferty zodiac story but also keeps you intrigued as Shackleton walks a clear line in storytelling that at once sticks it to the people who ruined his project while also, hopefully, not getting sued. Hopefully this film has an opportunity to reach the masses but it’s wiseacre look at the true crime doc industry would require a brave distributor or streamer to jump aboard. I hope that happens.

– Don R. Lewis (@ThatDonLewis)

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Don R. Lewis is a filmmaker and writer from Northern California. He was a film critic for Film Threat before becoming Editor-in-Chief of Hammer to Nail in 2014. He holds a BA in screenwriting from California State Northridge and is an MA candidate in Cinema Studies at San Francisco State.

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