Director Charlie Shackelton was careful to note that The Zodiac Killer Project (2025) isn't really about the Zodiac Killer when he took the stage at True/False. He's not wrong. Zodiac is a bit of a straw man here. Instead, the film takes aim at True Crime as a genre, by detailing how a film about the Zodiac Killer might have been assembled if Shackleton had managed to secure the rights to the book he wanted to use as a framework. He failed at that, and instead skirts around the copyright as he points out how true crime is constructed for an audience even without any primary footage to boost his case.
The catalyst for the whole project is a book about the Zodiac Killer by a former California Highway Patrolman named Lyndon Lafferty, who believes that he saw Zodiac pull into a parking spot next to him at a rest area. The man made eye contact with Lafferty, and somehow, Lafferty just knew. The man's features matched the famous sketch of Zodiac that was circulating at the time. Lafferty tracked him down from his license plate, and came to believe that a man named George Russell Tucker, who he then stalked for years attempting to find conclusive evidence that he was, in fact, the Zodiac Killer, even though his superiors and other law enforcement agencies did not take Lafferty seriously. So he wrote his book, The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge. This is the book that Shackleton wanted to use as the basis of a true crime film, but he failed to win the rights.
Instead, Shackleton visits a number of sites throughout northern California and films them as stand-ins for the locations in the book. Many of these are chosen not for verisimilitude, but for cinematic potential. Most of them are empty, suggesting a story that's in the negative spaces rather than in the film. My favorite of these is a library chosen to represent a police station. Shackleton keeps up a steady monologue over these images, emphasizing that they are not, in fact, places where the events of the story really happened. At one point--the funniest moment of the movie, as it so happens--Shackleton stops dead in the middle of his narration and says, "Hold on, this is cool," and waits for a guy on a dirt bike to do a wheelie through an intersection. He punctures the illusion throughout, often by calling attention to how the image on screen has been chosen to manipulate the audience. He calls one particular sunset "ostentatiously beautiful." He also includes stock footage that he calls "evocative b-roll." This is stuff like the clanging of a cell door, the spent casings of a pistol hitting the ground. He punctures the use of reenactments, too, calling the actors in such scenes "bactors" because they are usually filmed from the back to disguise their faces. He is positively gleeful when he puts all of this in context with the broader genre, often putting multiple instances of other true crime films on screen to demonstrate the tropes of the genre, often multiple instances at the same time. These include The Jinx, Making a Murderer, I'll Be Gone in the Dark, and Conversations with a Killer: The John Wayne Gacy Tapes. The repetition from film to film of images, narrative strategies, and even credit sequence motifs is startling.
One of the programmers a few years ago told me that she liked documentaries because, unlike fiction films, documentaries can lie. Indeed, there's a doctrine in verite` circles that every cut is a lie. This film is more aware of this than most. Indeed, it deconstructs its own field of nonfiction down to its component parts and lays it bare, like an autopsy. A receptive audience will walk away from The Zodiac Killer Project with a healthy skepticism of true crime, or, at the very least, an awareness of how true crime manipulates the narrative.
Predators (2025, directed by David Osit) is perhaps less overtly deconstructive of true crime than The Zodiac Killer Project, but it has a final sequence that reveals its intentions along these lines pretty clearly. The object of this film's gaze is the "To Catch a Predator" segments that ran on Dateline NBC in the early 2000s, in which the show ran a sting operation with actors posing online as underage teenagers in order to entrap men looking for sex with children. They would set up meetings with these men and then duck out as the host of the segment, Chris Hansen, stepped into the space to confront them with their crimes. The police would be lurking nearby to arrest these men once Hansen concluded his interviews with them. These segments ended once a Texas district attorney committed suicide once he realized he was caught in the sting. That hasn't stopped imitators from carrying on with the concept. The film focuses on one particular copycat before catching up with Hansen today, who has continued to hunt for child molesters in the age of social media and podcasting.
This starts as a traditional documentary where the filmmakers have used archival footage of the show and contemporary interviews with some of the decoys, now older. The idiom shifts in the second act as the filmmakers embed themselves with Skeeter Jean and his decoy ("T-coy," she calls herself), one of the YouTube copycats. The final act interviews Chris Hansen himself, who has no remorse for the actions of his team. Meanwhile, the questions for the audience pile up. How is this show not entrapment? How are these people not vigilantes (Hansen makes a point of cultivating relationships with law enforcement, but there are issues of corruption here that are mentioned but not fully explored)? And maybe most importantly, how is any of this prosecutable? The presence of journalists between the crime and the arrest creates a profound civil rights conflict. The men caught in this web are never read their rights in Hansen's script, never offered an attorney. Is any of this admissible in court? Would any of these men actually act on their urges if they weren't set-up? The moral murk of the project deepens as the film progresses. Osit and his crew manage to communicate all of this without indulging in a polemic. They are helped in this project by the nature of the crimes. These men are deeply unsympathetic. The Dateline people point out that even if the men involved never show up to the meetings, they are already guilty of a crime by even soliciting sex with people they believe to be underage. Somewhere in the negative space is the question of whether or not these men can ever reenter society, even as registered offenders, having been so publicly excoriated.
There's a political dimension to this, too, given that right wing scaremongers have used the shadow of internet predators as a cudgel in various moral panics in the years since. The stranger danger witch hunts of the 1980 and 1990s find their apotheosis in To Catch a Predator, something the filmmakers elide without explicitly addressing. Hansen's current role as a podcaster places him inside the ecosystem stoking these moral panics. He remains unapologetic. Skeeter Jean is maybe even more cynical. He's using the formula to gain views on YouTube and to monetize those views. Hansen may have a personal crusade to pursue, Skeeter Jean does it because it's a living. And what about the audience? What is it about the viewers of this kind of thing, or of true crime more generally that wants to see humiliation on this scale. It can't only be schadenfreude. Is it sadism? A collective impulse to mob violence? The Two-Minute Hate? The film doesn't even attempt to provide an answer.
"Help me to understand this," Hansen often said in his scripted interviews with the men he caught. That's something that Osit reflects back onto Hansen in his interview with him. At the conclusion of the interview, he tells Hansen, "You're free to go," just as Hansen told however many men he caught before sending them to be ambushed. The final montage of video footage mimics the split screen feeds from "To Catch a Predator" as the filmmakers watch Hansen leave the interview and get into his limo. The meaning of this is open to interpretation, but I take it to suggest that Hansen is a kind of predator himself. Regardless, it's a bitterly ironic piece of stage management.
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