In his new film, director Charlie Shackleton muses that it’s surprising that there hasn’t yet been a documentary about the Zodiac Killer. Though nonfiction film more broadly has struggled to find audiences since the pandemic, true crime remains extremely popular, and so much of that cultural fascination with the genre originated with the media sensation around the Zodiac case. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, the still-unidentified serial killer terrorized the Bay Area, murdering at least five people while taunting authorities with letters and cryptograms, some of which remain unsolved despite the best efforts of professionals and amateurs over the decades.
Robert Graysmith’s 1986 bestseller Zodiac: The Shocking True Story of the Hunt for the Nation’s Most Elusive Serial Killer, which inspired countless other books, films, TV series, and podcasts, is the standard-bearer of Zodiac media. But Shackleton turned his eye instead to a lesser-known such work: Former police officer Lyndon Lafferty’s 2012 book The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up. But his new documentary Zodiac Killer Project (2025), which recently premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, is not an adaptation of that book. As Shackleton tells it, the production’s efforts to secure the rights fell through. The film instead consists of footage shot around Vallejo, California, where the Zodiac Killer committed many of his attacks, combined with clips from true crime films and TV shows. Throughout, Shakleton explains what his adaption of Lafferty’s book would have looked like, including the structure, editing, sound, and music choices. It is both a documentary in its own right and a palimpsest of an unmade one. Together, it dissects the broader aesthetics of true crime.
Like Graysmith and so many other authors who have ridden the Zodiac publishing wave, Lafferty claimed to have definitively identified the killer. As it lacks the rights to the book, the film cannot delve fully into his argument, but this isn’t much of an issue, since Shackleton is wholly uninterested in actually pursuing the Zodiac Killer. Enough time has been spent on such morbid fixations — notably, David Fincher’s acclaimed 2007 film Zodiac, which feels as definitive a statement on the story as one can get while the mystery remains unsolved. Shackleton, instead, explores Lafferty’s obsession as a proxy for audiences’ unceasing appetite for this subject matter. At times the tale seems downright parodic; one sequence details how Lafferty devised a complicated operation to obtain his suspect’s palm prints that involved a fishbowl and a long speech at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. The situation sounds more like an I Think You Should Leave sketch than a scene from a crime show.
That comedic element is a tipoff to Shackleton’s wry perspective on the genre. Each time he describes how his film might have come out, he observes how many other movies and TV shows have done something similar. Speculating on what the opening title sequence would have looked like, he muses that it “would have made itself…. All these things are built to the same model now,” with representative clips from the credits of shows like The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst (2015–24) and Evil Genius (2017–ongoing). Similarly, when describing a police interrogation scene, he refers to all the firmly embedded tropes of such material: reel-to-reel tape players, hands clasped on tables, solitary bare lightbulbs. Instead of a true crime film, Shackleton has made something of a parody of one. But Zodiac Killer Project is also an incisive critique of how cliché-bound the genre has become, encouraging viewers to ask more from it.
Zodiac Killer Project (2025) is currently screening both in person and virtually as part of the Sundance Film Festival, which continues in various locations through February 2.
