British filmmaker, artist, and critic Charlie Shackleton gets the chance to work out feelings about the Zodiac killer documentary he never got to make — as well as his own about the genre itself — with “Zodiac Killer Project.” The never-found serial murderer who stalked the Bay Area in the 1970s remains the subject of endless cultural fascination, including as part of David Fincher’s own beloved 2007 film.
Sundance NEXT Innovator Award winner “Zodiac Killer Project,” which has played festivals globally since Park City, finally opens in theaters this November. In it, the director gives us an assemblage of missing pieces from a Zodiac documentary he was commissioned to make, but which ultimately fell through. Here, he is able to show us what that documentary would have looked like, down to even a close-call encounter with a potential suspect.
In the process, Shackleton delivers an often hilarious, satirical deep dive into how true crime documentaries, ever so the fashion these days, operate and work their way upon audiences. Along the way, Shackleton’s own droll voiceover guides us through his would-have-been production, here realized in meta form by Loop and Field of Vision. Ahead of the film‘s release, IndieWire shares the exclusive trailer for “Zodiac Killer Project” below.
Here’s the official synopsis:
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.
A witty and beautifully assembled deep dive into our obsession with serial killers and the stories we tell about them, Shackleton’s “Zodiac Killer Project” emerges from the ash heap to probe and deconstruct the form with the incisive eye of a true crime connoisseur.
As IndieWire’s David Ehrlich wrote in his Sundance review, the film “sees its director leveraging their misfortune into an impish and hyper-resourceful attack on the oppressive strictures of modern storytelling (in this case the rigid conventions of the true-crime genre rather than the mandates of a censorious regime), one that allows Shackleton to achieve a measure of freedom through the act of detailing his own cage. And, as was the case with its most obvious point of reference, the non-film that Shackleton has rescued from the jaws of erasure is almost certainly more rewarding than the one he was originally hoping to make.”
Music Box Films releases “Zodiac Killer Project” on Friday, November 21 in New York with an expansion to follow. Here’s the trailer, an IndieWire exclusive.