If you want to keep watching True Crime documentaries without having the curtain pulled, maybe skip Zodiac Killer Project, because you may never look at them the same way again. For everyone else, Zodiac Killer Project is an eye-opening account of the calcifying blueprint contemporary True Crime is beholden to.
Zodiac Killer Project is a deconstruction of the modern methods employed by True Crime documentaries. Charlie Shackleton was working on a documentary about the Zodiac Killer that fell through so now he’s giving away all the industry secrets about how the sausage is made. While Shackleton did not get to make his Zodiac movie, self-admitting that it’s already the most broadly told story in True Crime, the director’s modest self-analysis has resulted in a better documentary. Zodiac Killer Project is much more in Shackleton’s lane, after all, as the director of Paint Drying (2016), which is just ten hours of watching paint dry.
The machinations of the True Crime drama follow a strict formula. The story being told does not necessarily shape the form of True Crime so much as the accepted format shapes the story. It’s all very mechanical. Documentaries about serial killers follow the same beats every time, providing an ironic comfort in that they always deliver a safe harbor of familiar composition. By unpacking the commodified codes of storytelling deployed by the genre, Zodiac Killer Project works as a reflective examination of why these devices work, how they are chosen, and how these cliches are used to guide an audience.
So what do we see? Footage of sun-soaked empty parking lots. Vacuous spaces and places, Bay Area exteriors bleached by radiant Californian heat. The filmmaker narrates over the footage in meditative reflection. This is a work of media criticism first and a story about a cancelled project second.
The story the filmmaker was going to adapt was based on the 2012 book The Zodiac Killer Cover-up: The Silent Badge by highway patrol officer Lyndon E. Lafferty. Reading the book, Shackleton found it detailed new information about the Zodiac Killer and shows us what kind of documentary he was going to make.
Using the most popular True Crime media, such as Making a Murderer (2015) and The Jinx (2015), Shackleton leads us through the conventions used and shows us how these projects have been codified into formulas. He’d begin with an intro of fading landscapes, provocative insert shots, blended images that draw the audience’s curiosity. He’d utilize framing and blocking that are suggestive and lead the audience toward the conclusion he wants them to have. He’d stage reenactments drawn for the purpose of showing something familiar, that the audience will understand is the same symbology they have seen in all the other shows.
This is also a discussion of ethics in documentary filmmaking. Shackleton questions some of the leading non-fiction works for their practices, although also seems to admit he’s willing to play ball, that there is a tangible comfort and enjoyment that he also receives from the common elements of the genre. That said, there is more digging to do, and given the light-hearted playful tone of the narration, every insight is met with a missed opportunity to hold the genre more accountable and to more incisively relay to an audience how these projects are manipulating them.
There is the other matter here, that it seems like Shackleton was content to make a movie that he did not believe in, and is now recounting to us why he didn’t believe in it. Ultimately, it’s better that it didn’t happen so this documentary could, as True Crime so often lacks the faculty of self-analysis and is lost in its own filmic language of standards and practices put forth by streamers. Zodiac Killer Project is worth seeing and opens the door to an audience, prompting greater media literacy and insightfully examining the industrial context in which True Crime documentaries are made.