{"id":82407,"date":"2025-10-16T15:21:10","date_gmt":"2025-10-16T15:21:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/82407\/"},"modified":"2025-10-16T15:21:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-16T15:21:10","slug":"charlie-shackleton-tackles-true-crime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/82407\/","title":{"rendered":"Charlie Shackleton Tackles True Crime"},"content":{"rendered":"

British filmmaker, artist, and critic Charlie Shackleton gets the chance to work out feelings about the Zodiac killer documentary he never got to make \u2014 as well as his own about the genre itself \u2014 with \u201cZodiac Killer Project<\/a>.\u201d 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\u2019s own beloved 2007 film<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Sundance NEXT Innovator Award winner \u201cZodiac Killer Project,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\"'Ovation'\"<\/a> \"Tim<\/a> <\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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<\/a>\u2018s release, IndieWire shares the exclusive trailer for \u201cZodiac Killer Project\u201d below.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the official synopsis:<\/p>\n

Filmmaker Charlie Shackleton was hot on the trail of the next great American true crime documentary \u2014 a riveting account of a highway patrolman\u2019s quixotic effort to identify and capture the infamous Zodiac\u00a0Killer. Shackleton devised a plan, began collecting interviews, and shot \u201cevocative B-roll\u201d 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. <\/p>\n

A witty and beautifully assembled deep dive into our obsession with serial killers and the stories we tell about them, Shackleton\u2019s\u00a0\u201cZodiac\u00a0Killer Project\u201d\u00a0emerges from the ash heap to probe and deconstruct the form with the incisive eye of a true crime connoisseur.<\/p>\n

As IndieWire\u2019s David Ehrlich wrote in his Sundance review<\/a>, the film \u201csees 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\u00a0non-film that Shackleton has rescued from the jaws of erasure is almost certainly more rewarding than the one he was originally hoping to make.\u201d<\/p>\n

Music Box Films releases \u201cZodiac Killer Project\u201d on Friday, November 21 in New York with an expansion to follow. Here\u2019s the trailer, an IndieWire exclusive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"British filmmaker, artist, and critic Charlie Shackleton gets the chance to work out feelings about the Zodiac killer…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":82408,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[156,593,409,111,139,69,28104,63317],"class_list":["post-82407","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-film","tag-movies","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-trailers","tag-zodiac-killer-project"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82407","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82407"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82407\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/82408"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}