Pretend you’re sitting down for a lovely evening at home, and you fire up the streamer of your choice. You’ve already seen The Jinx, and The Most Dangerous Animal of All, and Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey, and I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, and a host of other documentaries on cults, heists, unsolved mysteries, sociopaths, and maniacs. The algorithm — it knows what you want, baby, and it’s ready to give it to you — serves up a new title. You click it out of curiosity. The film opens on a cop named Lyndon Lafferty, sitting in a 1960s-style police cruiser. Another car pulls into the spot right next to him. Considering the parking lot they’re in is mostly empty, the close proximity of this new vehicle feels oddly menacing.
Lafferty, we’re told, initially thinks nothing of this. But when he looks over, the man in the other car is staring right at him. “I knew I was looking into the eyes of death,” the voiceover says, as the film cuts between close-ups of two sets of eyes. The score begins to hum like angry hornets. The threat of something violent about to happen hovers in the air. Then the police cruiser pulls out of the lot and drives down the highway. After a while, Lafferty pulls over to the shoulder. He flips down the sun visor and there, tucked into the band, is the famous police sketch of the Zodiac Killer. It bears an uncanny resemblance to the person he just saw.
Or at least, that’s what you would have seen, had this actually been made. Instead, you watch a camera slowly pan over what may be the single most banal parking lot in Vallejo, California, while filmmaker Charlie Shackleton describes how he might have started the documentary he’d set out to do on one cop’s quixotic quest to catch a notorious predator. He’d have given it creepy credits, and ominous music cues, and everything you’d have wanted from the most popular genre of nonfiction moviemaking today. “Fuck,” Shackleton says, his voice filled with regret. “It would have been good!”
Zodiac Killer Project is not one more addition to the ever-expanding canon of true-crime docs. It is, in fact, something even better: an oddball, puckish, highly forensic side-eyed look at the True-Crime Entertainment Complex, and the way it’s turned grisly tabloid fodder into the most formulaic thing you can watch on a Friday night. The backstory: Shackleton came across Lafferty’s slightly obscure 2012 tome The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up, a.k.a. The Silenced Badge. The former highway patrol officer believed that he’d encountered the actual Zodiac Killer that day in the lot, and after tracking this person down, did everything he could to prove this was the man who’d terrorized the Bay Area throughout the Seventies. (He was also convinced that a cabal of law-enforcement mucky-mucks knew about this suspect and did everything they could to keep him from being outed, which, sure. OK.) Shackleton reached out to the late author’s estate and sought to procure the rights. In the spirit of can-do optimism, he began researching the case, visiting the Northern California region where everything happened, and retracing Lafferty’s steps.
Then a funny thing happened on the way to a million-dollar Netflix deal and the adoration of the masses. The Lafferty family, who’d seemed amenable at first, decided to withdraw their approval. Shackleton isn’t sure why, exactly, but he was now left with all this research and the need to chase something, anything, down. So he records himself telling an unknown listener how he would have treated each exciting plot twist, every sniffed-out lead, all the doubling back that Lafferty did when he hit dead ends. Often, Shackleton goes back to the source, reading Lafferty’s pulpy prose and noting where he would slot in what’s known as “evocative B roll,” i.e. inserts of smoking guns, falling bullet casings, vintage tape-cassette players.
That so much of this is being breathlessly reported over footage of quiet streets, calm intersections, and your typical everyday snapshots of NorCal life — the kind of deadly boring images that many true-crime docs trump up with over-aestheticized ballyhoo — is part of the punch line, and the point. Zodiac Killer Project not only wears its failure to launch as a non-silenced badge of pride, it wields the non-existence of Shackleton’s adaptation like a blunt force object. Describing an imaginary scratchy, cluttered credits sequence (“As if it was made by the serial killers themselves… it sets up everything and nothing”), he runs through a side-by-side montage of actual true-crime credits sequences, all of them blurring together into an indistinguishable reel. Clichés such as the chatty expositionary set-up (“like you’re watching a trailer of the movie you’re already watching”), the screen-ready authority figures, and the idea that every crime scene happened in a quaint, “normal” town that “had a dark side” get the same treatment. At one point, the camera slow-zooms in on the suspect’s house, while Shackleton details a stakeout. Except what you’re looking at, he eventually informs you, is just a random residence. They did go by the actual place, mind you. It just wasn’t creepy enough to film.
Shackleton in Zodiac Killer Project
Music Box Films
Shackleton isn’t above what he calls “the gravitational pull” of these docs, as either a documentarian or a viewer; after calling out Netflix’s limited series Dahmer for recreating sensationalistic carnage then tacking on a last-minute plea to honor the victims, the person he’s been talking to replies, “You watched it, though.” “Yeah, it was good!” Shackleton exclaims. He may be an experimental filmmaker who’s turned lemons into hypercritical, media-prankster-vibe lemonade, but he understands the car-wreck appeal of witnessing the worst of humanity turned into lurid entertainment. Shackleton has also noticed how these things have stuck to a certain template to such a degree that you can barely tell them apart. Every horrific homicide and/or serial killer’s story is different. Every docuseries and/or chronicle of these IRL atrocities, so evil the mind can barely comprehend such depravity, now feel numbingly the same.
Zodiac Killer Project starts as an autopsy of a fail, and ends up dismantling the subgenre via a sort of cinematic jujitsu. You leave happy that Shackleton’s project ended up crashing and burning. Hopefully he has some sense of closure from making this work out of the ashes and bones of his burnt phoenix of a project. But for those who watch these things regularly — who tune in to every new cold case gone hot again, every story of a family or marriage that seemed perfect from the outside, every small town with buried secrets and basements of corpses — there is never any sense of closure. There’s just whatever the algorithm serves you up next.
