SF DocFest 2025: Zodiac Killer Project

Against the backdrop of sunbaked parking lots, deserted courthouses, and empty suburban homes—the familiar spaces of true crime, stripped of all action and spectacle—a filmmaker describes his abandoned Zodiac Killer documentary and probes the inner workings of a genre at saturation point.

The true crime genre’s ubiquity is driven by people’s endless fascination, disgust, and—bizarrely—search for comfort in genre conventions that still have the ability to generate complex emotions despite their predictability and familiarity.