ZODIAC KILLER PROJECT Trailer: Charlie Shackleton Dissects the True Crime Genre with Unique Sundance Documentary

You haven’t seen a true crime documentary quite like Charlie Shackleton’s Zodiac Killer Project. One of the best films at this year’s Sundance, where it won the NEXT Innovator Award, it finds the director revisiting a failed project to adapt Lyndon E. Lafferty’s book “The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge,” turning it it into a sharp, surprisingly funny critique of the true crime genre itself. Following its festival run, Music Box Films has now set it for a November 21 release at NYC’s IFC Center, before expanding nationwide in the following weeks.

Editor-in-Chief Don Lewis wrote in his Sundance review, “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… 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 its wiseacre look at the true crime doc industry would require a brave distributor or streamer to jump aboard. I hope that happens.”

As the official synopsis reads:

Filmmaker Charlie Shackleton was hot on the trail of the next great American true crime documentary—a riveting account of a highway patrolman’s quixotic effort to identify and capture the infamous Zodiac Killer. Shackleton devised a plan, began collecting interviews, and shot “evocative B-roll” footage of ghostly California freeways and parking lots where the killer may have once lurked. And then the project fell apart, leaving Shackleton with fragments of the unfinished film and time to ruminate on shortcuts and signifiers of the ubiquitous genre. Zodiac Killer Project emerges from the ash heap to probe and deconstruct the form with the incisive eye of a true crime connoisseur. A witty and beautifully assembled deep dive into our obsession with serial killers and the stories we tell about them, Shackleton’s resuscitation of his abandoned film follows in the free-range footsteps of documentary philosophers Errol Morris, Werner Herzog, and Joshua Oppenheimer.

Watch the official trailer below.

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