Critics Campus 2025 participant Thomas Phillips speaks to director Charlie Shackleton about revitalising shelved ideas and critiquing the excesses of true crime in Zodiac Killer Project, an essayistic meta-documentary about a film he was forced to abandon.

In 2022, Charlie Shackleton says he received an “incredibly destabilising” email. At the time, the London-based filmmaker and multimedia artist was in Vallejo, California, conducting research for a true-crime documentary. He planned to adapt a memoir by the late Lyndon E. Lafferty, a highway patrol cop who believed he had identified the elusive Zodiac Killer. After a morning spent scouting for locations, the film’s composition had already crystallised in Shackleton’s mind. Then he checked his inbox. Licensing negotiations with Lafferty’s estate had collapsed, he learned. Without adaptation rights, creating the film he had envisioned was impossible.

Dozens of folders on Shackleton’s laptop are dedicated to abandoned projects (“Most of them are dreadful,” he says, with characteristic humility), but letting go of this one felt different. After returning home to London, he remembers boring his friends “half to death” by describing his predicament at length to anyone who would listen, “telling them every little detail of these imagined scenes that [he] would never get to shoot”. But he now sees these ruminations as rehearsals for what the project would eventually become: “a real-time retelling of a film that you can’t actually see”.

Far from the conventional feature he initially conceived, Zodiac Killer Project is a playfully irreverent essay film that embraces its own constraints. Accompanied by eerie footage of locations across Vallejo, Shackleton’s conversational voiceover alternates between an account of the film he planned to make and periodic digressions about true crime’s most questionable tropes – from the spooky impressionism of title sequences to the flattening of real people into generic villains. With Lafferty’s memoir off limits, the resulting work relies mostly on public-domain sources to reconstitute as much of his story as possible. The narrative is inherently fragmented, but the comically conspicuous evasion of copyright infringement becomes a compelling plotline in its own right.

“I’ve always felt very at ease leaning in to that referential approach to filmmaking,” says Shackleton. Much of his work is metatextual, and all of his feature-length works are about cinema, including Beyond Clueless (2014) and Fear Itself (MIFF 2016), which examine the teen and horror genres, respectively. This self-reflexive outlook stems from Shackleton’s past as a film critic, a background that also makes him less defensive about his work. “People have seen the film and found me incredibly grating,” he admits, describing the negative reviews of Zodiac Killer Project with detached neutrality. Reception to his droll style has been largely positive, though, and Shackleton won the NEXT Innovator Award at this year’s Sundance, where the film premiered.

Zodiac Killer Project is most facetious when parodying “evocative B-roll” – the industry term for fabricated shots that can evoke story beats without the need for archival footage – like a cutaway of fake blood pooling across a constructed crime scene. After using excerpts from other true-crime documentaries to demonstrate how easily these images can stretch the truth, the film begins deploying its own to wilfully exaggerate drama: falling bullet casings assign guilt to a possibly innocent suspect; the chaotic whiz of microfiche infuses an investigation with paranoia; a forebodingly generous pour of scotch insinuates mental unravelling. “We were aiming for the trope-iest, most clichéd version of each of these shots,” explains Shackleton, who says most of them were recreated from memory rather than using visual references. The resulting footage is at once familiar and off-kilter, with a sense of dread so heightened that it ascends to campiness.

Critiques sharpen as the film progresses. After Lafferty secretly records a suspect’s intimate disclosures at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and publishes them in his book, Shackleton scrutinises true crime’s tendency to disguise exploitation as the noble pursuit of justice. “If you’re convinced it’s for the greater good,” he suggests in voiceover, “there are very few ethical lines as far as HBO execs are concerned.” In a 2021 essay, film scholar Pooja Rangan and documentarian Brett Story broaden this argument. They contend that even socially minded true-crime narratives – such as those exposing wrongful convictions – still take advantage of human suffering and uphold oppressive notions of guilt and innocence. “True crime is not the ally of justice, but its antinomy,” they write, advocating for stories that reject the warped logic of cruel judicial systems altogether.

Zodiac Killer Project

One of Shackleton’s earlier documentaries arguably aligns with this ideal. Set in Thatcher-era England, Lasting Marks (2018) is a haunting short film about a homophobic police investigation called ‘Operation Spanner’. By mischaracterising consensual sadomasochism as assault, the probe led to convictions for 16 queer men, one of whom narrates the film. After describing his alleged crime with disarming candour, the subject recounts the imprisonment and tabloid humiliation that followed, discrediting the state-sanctioned system that usually orients true crime’s moral compass. But, despite this genre subversion, Shackleton clarifies that any relation to true crime was unintentional, although he’s sure the genre influenced him subconsciously: “I was certainly watching insane amounts of true crime while making [it], as I have for most of my adult life.”

Some reviews of Zodiac Killer Project describe Shackleton’s deep affinity for true crime as a “love–hate relationship”, a label he refutes. “It was always something I had unwittingly become all too familiar with before I even developed much of a positionality to it,” he says. “It just feels like the water that we’re all swimming in.” For the director, this exposure intensified when the film’s completion was immediately followed by an editing role on Predators (2025), a documentary about the controversial reality TV series To Catch a Predator, which blurs the boundaries between law enforcement and sensationalist spectacle. “I had full true-crime brain for a good year-and-a-half,” he recalls, detailing the “enormous psychic toll” of immersing himself in such bleak material.

Once both productions had wrapped, Shackleton had “no desire at all to watch any true crime for pleasure”, and he doubts he’ll ever direct another true-crime film. “I’ve sort of written my own bad review,” he muses. “But never say never. When money gets extremely tight, who knows?” For the time being, Shackleton is working on several prospective projects – although he’s determined never to get too ahead of himself during pre-production again. “I suppose they could become even more frustratingly unrealised dreams. But, for now, I’m still clinging onto the idea of them happening.”

Zodiac Killer Project screened as part of the MIFF 2025 program.

The above has been written as part of MIFF’s Critics Campus program. The opinion expressed is the author’s and does not necessarily reflect that of the festival.