True/False 2025: Charlie Shackleton’s cheeky meta-documentary Zodiac Killer Project wants true crime to do better
Courtesy True/False Fest
Missouri-based film festival True/False is running currently, and this is one of the many reviews about new, innovative documentary & documentary-adjacent movies premiering in Columbia, MO. Read more here.
Charlie Shackleton wanted to make a documentary adapting Lyndon E. Lafferty’s book The Zodiac Killer Cover-up: The Silenced Badge. But that didn’t work out for…reasons. That’s not unusual, this stuff happens all the time in filmmaking.
What’s unusual is what Shackleton decided to do instead: he made Zodiac Killer Project, a documentary about what his documentary would have looked like if he’d been able to make it.
As Shackleton describes it, his film would’ve been pretty unremarkable. He planned re-enactments and shots of archived documents with some film grain thrown on top to make it creepy. There’s also what he calls “evocative b-roll,” footage taken of locations from the events Lafferty, a former California Highway Patrol officer, details in his book, which follows his personal investigation of a man he believed to be the Zodiac Killer.
You’ve seen dozens of movies and mini-series like what Zodiac Killer Project would’ve been on every streaming platform known to man. And that’s the point. 
In breaking down his plans for the failed documentary and compiling an extensive pitch deck of comparable projects, Shackleton — perhaps best known for his project crowdfunding a 10-hour film of paint drying as a prank on the British Board of Film Censors — cheekily comments on the true crime genre’s lack of creativity and makes us ask why we like these stories, while admitting he’s just as taken with them as the rest of us. In an amazing cinematic sleight-of-hand, he manages to do this while making his movie (or at least his movie that is a description of his original intentions for his movie) legitimately compelling and tense on its own.
Zodiac Killer Project switches between existing b-roll footage Shackleton and his cinematographer, Xenia Patricia, had already shot around Vallejo, Calif., and clips from other numerous true crime documentaries, with Shackleton narrating. Occasionally we’ll get a shot of him in the recording booth, with some of his own footage reflected on the window, a delightfully self-aware refraction of a refraction.
One of Shackleton’s clips is the infamous episode of The Jinx in which Robert Durst accidentally confesses to multiple murders. That moment played well with the True/False crowd, who were among the first people in the world to see that episode when it screened at the fest in 2015. Its inclusion also exemplifies Shackelton’s larger point. Non-fiction filmmakers are drawn to true crime because of its inherent drama, but in trying to create a marketable story (you do have to make money on this stuff in order to live, after all), your ethics become squishy by necessity in order to keep your viewers hooked.
That problem isn’t limited to documentary filmmaking, either. Shackleton also brings up the first season of Ryan Murphy’s Netflix series Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, which came under fire for sensationalizing the case and the man at its center rather than the stories of his many victims. But even Shackleton has to admit, despite the show’s unconvincing final-episode swerve placing the burden of exploitative blame back on the audience, he enjoyed watching it.
Zodiac Killer Project is an act of artistic and personal self-examination from someone who’s well-versed in the form, drawing inspiration from everything from The Thin Blue Line to Wild Wild Country to Documentary Now!. But Shackleton’s descriptions of the Zodiac case itself, and Lyndon Lafferty, are genuinely engrossing, even as he admits the whole thing is pretty crackpot. It’s a true crime documentary for people who hate true crime, and for people who love it, and for people who hate that they love it. Whatever your position, Shackleton is right there with you.
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