Tugging at True-Crime's Seams in SXSW Doc Zodiac Killer Project

The lone investigator, hunting for evidence. Images of falling files. Opening credits with mournful country music playing over images of faces with landscapes projected on them. A weird and overstretched visual metaphor. Just a taste of the endless tropes of the modern true crime documentary.

Charlie Shackleton admits he would have committed those cinema sins if he’d been able to make his planned documentary about the Zodiac Killer. Instead, with Zodiac Killer Project (which plays at South by Southwest as part of the Festival Favorites category following a world premiere at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival), he was able to discuss why it feels like every true crime doc looks the same these days.

“There’s a diminishing number of documentaries that have a crime as their subject and an ever-growing number of true crime documentaries which, at this point, is less a description of the content and more a genre with extremely well-worn stylistic tropes and narrative beats,” Shackleton said.

Moreover, those conventions are becoming increasingly calcified. “Even comparing Netflix true crime docs from five years ago with Netflix true crime docs [today], you can feel how much the formula has tightened, and where there was room for any kind of variance that had really been ironed out.”

The change came because Shackleton was providentially unlucky. The unlucky part was that he’d spent years, a lot of energy, and a fair amount of cash prepping to make a documentary adaptation of The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge, a 2012 book by former Vallejo PD officer Lyndon Lafferty. Within its pages, Lafferty not only claimed to have unmasked the notorious serial killer who terrorized San Francisco between 1968 and 1969 but also to have uncovered a conspiracy to keep him from being arrested. Out of all the dozens of books about the Zodiac Killer, Shackleton found himself drawn to “the wilder aspects of the pursuit” in Lafferty’s version. “Specifically, the various scheme to gather evidence. Because they felt both like very familiar aspects of the true crime narrative, but at the same time run through with this bizarre, almost absurdist streak.”

The providence part came when Lafferty’s family suddenly pulled the plug, ending negotiations for the rights. Shackleton, never one to be deterred, pivoted and created Zodiac Killer Project – a movie about his relationship with the film that he nearly made. As a director who admits to working best under limitations, “this was the ultimate limitation – making the film you can’t make.”

And this was definitely a question of not being deterred rather than some unhinged obsession with justice, or an attempt to prove the Lafferties wrong. “I’m not too bad at stopping,” Shackleton said. “I’m OK at accepting that a piece of work will never be perfect, could always be better. But what I am not very good at making my peace with is waste, and so the idea of pouring however many hours of work, time, effort, money into a project that then just doesn’t come to fruition is truly unbearable to me.”

Yet, that’s part of filmmaking. Every filmmaker has a list of dead, unfinished, or incomplete projects, and Shackleton admitted he had his fair share of those. However, he said, “With this project in particular, I really failed to come to terms with that waste because I had so fully conceptualized it. At a certain point, it so wasn’t going away that I went, ‘Maybe there is something to this inability to let it go, and that’s its own creative idea.’”

So what he came up with was Zodiac Killer Project, a documentary about Lafferty’s story, his failed attempt to get it made, and how incredibly riddled with conventions that true crime genre has become.

The format of this substitute documentary came pretty easily. Zodiac Killer Project is primarily Shackleton in a recording studio, answering questions from an unseen third party about what he would have done if the other film had happened. “I was describing the thing I planned to make, in the pub, to a mate … The tone of those conversations would be kind of glib, and a bit mocking, but with an undercurrent of affection.”

During those conversations over a pint, “inevitably I would reference other true crime things because I’d been watching so many of them when I was preparing the film.” That’s something in common among all filmmakers, “so there’s always a degree of self-awareness about where you’re falling into formulas, and how you’re hopefully going to differentiate your thing from a thousand other things. So that metatextual element didn’t need to be imposed upon the idea.”

Shackleton doesn’t set himself apart from other filmmakers, leading a vital element of humility about the film. After all, he admitted that he is fully aware that, if he’d have actually adapted Zodiac Killer Cover-Up, he would have done exactly what every other documentarian does. However, he doesn’t blame them either, since many documentarians end up doing true crime “either for a paycheck or because it’s the only thing they could get commissioned right now.”

Moreover, making Zodiac Killer Project allowed Shackleton to interrogate the questions of who owns a story that they contend is true – thus, in effect, owning truth. That issue of exclusivity is something he has seen getting worse and more common over the last decade. “Now, a lot of the big production companies churning out this stuff for streaming networks won’t even go down the road of pursuing a story unless all of the key subjects are signed up exclusively to that project.”

Because Lafferty’s estate did not sell Shackleton the rights, there were original elements from the book that he couldn’t use and scenes he had to cut – and talks about cutting in the film. At the same time, there were other parts of the narrative that, due to being substantiated by other sources, he was able to include. That includes a bizarre diversion that he called “the fishbowl incident. The moment I read that, the key images were seared into my retinas, straight off the page and into this perfectly cinematic form.” While he couldn’t include the full version, “I got to include a couple of flashes.”

Not that the process of making Zodiac Killer Project has completely scratched the itch of not being able to make Zodiac Killer Cover-Up. While the movie he finally made “accentuates the parts of that planned documentary that would have been most formulaic, I wouldn’t have been making that film if I didn’t think I could have done something interesting with it.” He paused. “But looking back on it, that might have been what I told myself to justify doing it.”

---

Zodiac Killer Project

Festival Favorites, Texas Premiere

Saturday 8, 9pm, Alamo South Lamar
Sunday 9, 8:30pm, Alamo South Lamar
Tuesday 11, 9:15pm, Alamo South Lamar

---

Catch up with all of The Austin Chronicle's SXSW 2025 coverage.