In 2025, I sat down with filmmaker Charlie Shackleton -ahead of his intro and Q&A at the MAC for his film Zodiac Killer Project – to discuss all things supplemental and olfactory, for what became the article ‘Zodiac Sniffer Project’. We began talking about his tour.

CS: I’ve been looking at the sales for today, not great but not terrible.

JR: I looked at it and thought, ‘hey, that’s pretty alright!’.

CS: This is one of three sites on this tour I haven’t screened at before, and it’s always just a total question mark on if anyone’s gonna turn up. But I had my low watermark in Sheffield and it can’t be worse than that.

CS: I don’t know about the definite article. It has one of those titles that’s easily misremembered, so I get a lot of emails about “Untitled Zodiac Killer Project” or “The Zodiac Film”. I think this is the only one that’s gone on sale with the wrong title. The one at the Rio was loudly advertising a Q and A with “Charlie Shacklefraud”. And that stung because that’s my local cinema, I live like ten seconds away from it, I’m there all the time!

JR: Surely that’s an in-joke – have they mixed it with Schadenfreude?

CS: Oh, I said Shackle’ford’.

JR: Would you still go see a film called “The Zodiac Killer Project, d’you think? How much does it change about the films itself?

CS: I mean, I went through all these experimentations when we were naming it. It didn’t have a name until like…the final week of post production. I think “the”… there’s a certain arrogance to “the”, it’s like, you’re saying it’s the definitive… yours would have been the definitive Zodiac Killer Project.. I remember “a” was floated at one point, that felt a little too artsy, a little too “art is moving image”…

JR: it’s almost a kind of horseshoe between “the” and “a”, it’s like “hey, we’re only one in a wave…”

CS: It’s like, faux-humble, isn’t it?

It wasn’t until we landed on Zodiac Killer Project that I got the title of Blair Witch Project. In my head, Blair Witch Project was some sort of spooky thing, like there was the Blair Witch and the Blair Witch project, her evil scheme, or the project of these teens trying to awaken the evil spirit – whereas, of course, it was the working title of their film, which never occurred to me for 20 years. We’ve all been saying it wrong. It’s “blair witch project”.

JR: They should have named the remake “Blair.mkv” or something.

CS: “Untitled Blair Witch IP Exploitation”, yeah.

Anyway, I went through every imaginable option, and wasn’t that happy with this one when we settled on it, but I have now got used to it, which is nice.




CS: I feel like either a project comes together organically, but it’s forever in search of a title, or I have the title immediately and the project never comes together, so that’s happened a lot…

With titles of films I’ve mostly been frustrated by after naming them. I did a performance piece called “As Mine Exactly”, and I really liked that name. For the most part, I just slowly make my peace. 

How do you feel looking back at previous projects like Paint Drying, compared to the ‘failure’ of Zodiac Killer Project?

CS: Yeah, so I did Paint Drying 10 years, almost precisely. The Kickstarter would’ve been live at this moment ten years ago, but it never screened anywhere apart from for the BBFC. It’s only in the last few years that there have been these one-off screenings here and there, including one in Portugal and one in Brisbane, which as a result means on Wikipedia and IMDB – It’s now listed as a 2023 film weirdly? There’s this whole debate in the talk page about whether it should be listed as a 2023 film, when obviously all its significance was in 2016, but they’re like “these are the rules, it’s about first public presentation” – which in a way is quite nice because now people falsely think it was two years ago, so it makes me sound like I’ve got a lot more going on. Really keeping myself in the cultural mix, whereas actually I’m not, I’m coasting on the fumes of a provocation from 10 years ago.

JR: I mean that really is Shackle-fraud.

Recently I’ve been obsessed with Peter Strickland’s Letterboxd. He did mention you in his review for Sátántangó – he said part of his reason for doing Letterboxd is, like, seeing how something like “Paint Drying’ can be personal but still speak to the film in some way.1

CS: That’s very sweet – I saw him briefly when I screened the film in Oxford, and he told me that he decided he’s gonna do one social media platform at a time, and this is his new one! So he’s getting very involved.

We spoke about Peter Strickland’s introduction to Goodbye, Dragon Inn – spoken about in my article on Screen B14’s community cinema screenings – where Strickland speaks entirely about never having seen the film, just being interested in it, and then not being able to stay for the film itself.

JR: It is kind of perfect, it definitely accentuated my watching it, I could just imagine that in its entirety. Obviously the film itself kind of speaks to that anyway.

CS: Yeah it’s a film about not watching a film.

Over the Course of your tour, have you found an art to the Q&A?

CS: Oh yeah, definitely – I feel like Q&A’s are definitely a learning curve for me. One of the things I remember realising early on, just from observing other people’s Q&As, is that you really need to ride the transition from film to Q&A very carefully. Often I’d have the experience at film festivals where everyone’s very excited to be premiering their films, and especially in the documentary world often those films are quite serious sober examinations of worthy topics, and fairly frequently it would happen that the film would end and the filmmakers would come up to do a Q&A, and it would become apparent that they’d been drinking at the bar the whole time, being really giddy and excited about their film career, and they’d be having a party up on stage, and it’d be really jarring in contrast to the experience of watching their film.

I remember that being an early realisation that you have to pitch yourself at whatever tonal or dramatic register your film ends on. I’d often struggle with this, especially because I felt for a long time, the films I was making didn’t necessarily share my personality? And so I’d then feel quite affected when I’d try to be the person who resembled the film afterwards, which was what partly led me to putting myself in the work to the extent that I am in this film – the film is full of me, I narrate the entire thing, on an improvisatory basis, so it really does have my demeanour and my delivery – and in theory therefore there’s a collapsed distance between the film and the Q&A. If anything it feels like the film never ended. In some ways it’s made it easier I think?

JR: I mean hey, you’ve been making them for the Q&A.

CS: But I think this one, because there’s so much of me in it, does also feel often, by the time you get to the QnA, it’s a bit redundant. Everything that needs to be said by me has already been said by me. But then I think on the flipside of that, it gives people more impetus to challenge me on some of what’s in the film, because they feel like I’ve been doing a QnA for the last hour and a half and now they’re gonna get to respond. But no, it’s interesting, it’s definitely a very different way of seeing a film.

Have you seen any Q&As that drastically changed your opinion of the film?

CS: No, not really – it’s more like it leaves a more sour taste in my mouth, even after a film you’ve enjoyed, if you end up coming away with a bad impression of the filmmaker, and not necessarily because they’re actually dislikable in any particular way, but because there’s something jarring about the combination – or sometimes you just sympathise. I remember going to a Q&A in Berlin where it was their world premiere; I liked the film, it seemed to broadly go down well with the audience, they got up ecstatic, clearly top 5 life moment kinda thing… and proceeded to get four questions from the audience, all of which were absolutely brutal takedowns of the film by people who felt really strongly about the film being unethical in various ways. All of these responses felt very valid, and I think that’s exactly the point of a film festival like that: to show art, even as the first worldwide screening, and create the space for people to respond to it in any way they choose – it was just unfortunate that, like, all of the responses were so brutal. And god, looking at the filmmakers’ faces when they left the stage – it was like they’d gone from the best to the worst night of their lives – it was agony. 

Have you had any audience responses that have transformed your feeling about Zodiac Killer Project?

CS: Not really, – pretty routinely people will challenge me on the ethics of the film, which are kind of welcome. The form of the film is very much me going through all of these ideas that I had for this crime documentary and speaking to my own ambivalent feelings about how those ideas might be simultaneously dramatically effective and ethically unsound. I have a lot of ambivalence about a lot of those choices which I think is expressed in the film, but it’s expressed in a way that’s often quite glib and quite jokey, which I think for some people leaves it unclear as to whose side I’m on. Some people will challenge that, which I think is fair enough, and I tried to speak my peace but at the same time, I don’t think it’s really the point for me to try and acquit myself for the benefit of an audience. I think the point is that they’re having that thought at all, and hopefully applying it across the genre and not just to my film. 

JR: I’ve quite enjoyed having a look through the various responses on Letterboxd. I remember reading a couple one star reviews that were really exciting to me, like “I just cant wait to see this now” – because of that discomfort about your style. Has there been a particularly bad review of something that has made you excited to check it out?

CS: Yeah, definitely – I used to work as a film critic, and I think the greatest benefit for me now as a filmmaker has been very much not assessing criticism of my films on the basis of whether it’s a positive or negative, as much as whether it’s like, engaged with the film in a way that I think is meaningful. It’s great when the meaningful engagement is also positive, that’s the dream obviously, but I would take the former over the latter definitely. I can remember at Sundance when the first and biggest round of reviews came out, the review that David Ehrlich wrote for Indiewire I thought was the one of that first round that most engaged and interrogated the movie that felt in the spirit of it, even though it was far from the most positive review, it was like, a 7 out of 10 which is nice, but it wasn’t a rave. But yeah, I think I’ve come to view that as certainly more valuable than any screamingly positive review that doesn’t delve into the film.

To be honest, in recent years, I think the biggest shift since I was working as a critic on my viewing habits is that I really won’t watch stuff now if  I think I’m not gonna like it. So those reviews that go viral because they’re takedowns of films, I might enjoy reading them but I’m not gonna go away and watch the movie if I expect to feel the same way as the reviewer. 

JR: One that I recently found was Roger Ebert’s review for ‘Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie’ – it’s like a complete hatred of it, a complete distaste. In my head, I wanna say it was his last review ever – that’s just me making that up, probably. 

CS: That feels sort of plausible! The timeline is more or less right, feels like it would’be been in the last trouch. 

JR: It feels like… with filmmakers, you wanna get a good one out before you die. With critics, I think you want to make a one-star review as your last one, to kinda go “this has killed me off”.

CS: I can’t think of any critic’s last reviews being very notable. I’m sure they exist. 

JR: It’s a tough one. Maybe we need more critics dying young to sort of counter it – it’s potentially plausible as a sort of cultural act, to be like “this is how I feel about this film”. Sort of feels like the sort of thing they’d do in the 1900s.

Thinking of Polyester‘s ‘Odorama’2, are there any other
supplemental aspects of film screenings
that stand out for you?

CS: Yeah, I feel pretty sympathetic to the eventisation of cinema, because it feels to me like one coherent path forward from the clearly unsustainable we’re in currently where like we have a cinema culture built on a model 100 years ago, before there were options about how to view movies. It’s just fairly obviously not viable to remain wedded to a system that relies on you being able to get five auditoriums worth of Pillion viewers in every day throughout the first three weeks of December. It makes sense to me the idea that you make cinema more of an event, and that’s better for everyone. Most people, for most films I feel like, would rather watch a film with a full house than they wouldn’t sit on their own. Exactly how you build a business around that, I don’t know – because obviously that’s going to work much better on a Saturday Night than it’s going to work on, like, a Tuesday Afternoon. As a result, I feel pretty open to any of the stuff that exhibitors come up with to try and get people in.

It hasn’t been such a factor on this film for instance… people have talked about – “Could we program some true Crime films alongside?”… we could, but is anyone going to come and watch fucking Paradise Lost in the cinema in 2025?

I think in all honesty, the extent of the ‘event’ that I’m looking for is that I can hopefully see some people I know there – and we can have a beer in the bar afterwards. And that kind of comes with the rest, right? If you build enough of an audience, if you build a kind of community in your venue, then people come to expect that. At least in London, there was a real lull for at least five years where it felt like almost no cinema in the city had that kind of audience. In the last few years it’s really come back in an exciting way, where there are now at least three or four cinemas where I can reliably know that if you go on any given evening there’s going to be an atmosphere, and you’re going to feel like you’re kind of part of something and not just sort of traipsing off to the cinema on your own to sit in the dark and be quiet.

JR: Do you think that was kind of formed or informed by any particular change?

CS:  I think there was a lot of pessimism in the circuit prior to that, in the kind of immediate post-digital switch-over, pre- and then certainly mid- Covid era. A lot of sites, I think, have just internalized this pessimism of like, ‘we had it good in 2004, back when it seemed like multiplex culture was going to last forever, and now it’s died and we’re helpless to do anything about it’. Certainly the cinematic programmers I’m thinking about have made a really concerted effort to build a new audience in the last few years.

[With] audiences for their part, especially younger audiences, I think there’s a renewed interest in being part of a collective, communal cinema audience. As much as I might have ambivalent feelings about Letterboxd, it’s immeasurable the impact that has had on cinemagoing. I went to see Come and See at the Prince Charles, which I’d never seen before. I went on Tuesday afternoon at 4pm. And not only was it packed, there was like fully 300 people there to watch Come and See. But I was, like, the oldest person there. And that you can literally see people logging in on Letterboxd as they left. If it works, yeah. I can go for it. I’m very glad that it does seem to be happening.

If you were to make a Scratch-and-Sniff for Zodiac Killer Project, what scents would you pick?

CS: I’m at a disadvantage here because I have a really bad sense of smell. Terribly bad. And I don’t know, true crime is, in some ways, so slickly detached in its aesthetic that I almost find it hard to think of it having a smell. It’s like all of its images are too clinical for that. Because, you know, what would you say the smells are? Like blood and cigarettes, smoke, gunpowder. But all those, they all feel too live, too raw for something that’s so inherently kind of cold.  

JR: The only counter to that is – and can we really call it, like, True Crime? – but like, those Mukbangs of sort-of recounting true crime stories that on Youtube, where it’s those absolute feasts you get while it’s happening.

CS: Wait– I’m not… I know what a Mukbang is, and I know the thing you mean where people do, like, vlogs, to use the very old school terminology, but this is the synthesis of the two? I feel like I’m about to see something horrible. 

I show Charlie some search results for ‘True Crime Mukbang’ on Youtube.

CS: “He injected his fluid into random women at the grocery store. Here’s why…” I’m gonna watch without sound maybe…

JR: I mean, feel free to-

CS: I don’t really want to.

We watch a portion.

JR: Do you feel comforted? Do you feel sated?

CS:  It’s odd, isn’t it? I mean, the true crime aspect is kind of arbitrary in that. Feels like the main component is like a kind of companionship thing, right? Like you have the sense of having a friend who’s excitedly telling you something, which, you know, in some ways that’s like the thesis of my film – I’m the friend excitedly telling you something. In this case it happens to be about a true crime project, but it could just be anything else. There’s something kind of uncanny and a little unnerving about these stories of real lives and deaths being subsumed into such an ecosystem. 

JR: Do you think there’s a market for – a bit like those ratatouille screenings where they have the food portioned throughout – do you think you could see a version of that happening [with Zodiac Killer Project]? In order for that epitome of companionship to really take effect?

CS: True crime is like a bad case study for any of these questions because it just has no theatrical life at all anyway.  So this is the universe it exists in. It’s like the universe of content and user generation or user response material. 

JR: And I guess the fact it needs that extra aspect also speaks to that as well – it’s like, can it now just be on its own?

CS: That’s certainly the the ecosystem that the true crime industry is sort of working for, one of remixing and reappropriation and TikTok culture, which sits very uneasily alongside the kind of stated moral intentions of a lot of these things – but that is the thing that a lot of them want – like a viral TikTok clip – it’s their thing to hit number one on the Netflix chart.

JR: In the sort-of recent acquisition of Warner Brothers, do you think that the ‘eventization’ of screenings is going to potentially increase?3

CS: What, in opposition to that? Maybe. Yeah, I mean it’s weird. In some ways, there’s kind of an uneasy alignment between the likes of Netflix and the sort of thing we’re talking about. I think Netflix would quite happily maintain a theatrical presence for its work that is purely eventized. To some extent, obviously, they’re just doing this to appease the filmmakers and silence their critics by buying the Paris Theatre and fucking making ten 35mm prints of Jay Kelly for whoever. They’ll do that because it’s an easy win, and because they can extract a certain amount of prestige and event and spectacle out of it that they don’t need to do a thousand-screen launch to achieve. In some ways, if you completely divorce that from the context, I’m sympathetic to it. I think that’s not a bad assessment of the way that cinema is heading.

Obviously I would not so credulously assume that’s what Netflix’s actual intentions are. I think if they could destroy theatrical entirely tomorrow, they would obviously do it because it would advantage them massively.I think we can kind of give them a certain amount of credit without running away with ourselves. But certainly, you know, like their takeover of Paris, their takeover of the Egyptian, certainly to me seems a more plausible vision for how those cinemas could continue to exist than anyone else seems to be offering. I mean, Paris is, I think, now the last ‘movie palace’ in New York. And all the others are closed, obviously, because you can’t operate a 1,000, 2,000 seat cinema anymore. Who would go? What would you show? What’s the point? We’ve got the Odeon Leicester Square still in London, but they’ve already reduced the seating from, I think, 1,500 to, like, 600. And even then, they can’t fill it most of the year if they don’t have a VistaVision print of One Battle After Another. If the way to hold on to the Paris is that Netflix buy it and run it at a loss and it screens 35mm prints of their shit prestige films and then they lend it to the American Cinematheque three nights a week and you get some interesting programming in there, that seems like not-a-terrible outcome, if things were now absolutely frozen in amber and stayed the same as opposed to that being the gateway to getting rid of it all entirely.

JR: I do think that there is a huge benefit of pop-up exhibition as a whole, as a sort of method to kind of go towards – it can definitely exist in grassroots terms, as every city has. And then of course, on the scale of Netflix, who can afford to kind of do these things, like you said, as a kind of stunt.  I wonder if there is a sort of middle ground, some form in between those that can exist – I don’t know what that would involve.

CS: I suppose the thing that’s, like, very unrealistic is thinking of these two poles as having… in any way shared goals…

At this point, we met up with Sabina Stent, who was hosting the Q&A with Charlie at the MAC”s screening. We stopped there, to give time for him to be acquainted with the space. As we split, I gave him half of a curly-wurly I’d found in my bag, and we spoke about the takeover of Cadbury World by Mondelez. I mentioned the smell of chocolate that would waft as a kid, from the lane by the factory. Looking in the river, it seemed, as a kid, to be the version of Willy Wonka’s chocolate river. Growing up, it became clearer that it was a pond of dirty water.


Read Jacob’s larger piece on Charlie Shackleton’s Zodiac Killer Project here.

Footnotes

1. The review does not mention Charlie Shackleton – instead, he is mentioned in Strickland’s first comment. ↩︎
2. The film Polyester, directed by John Waters, features a scratch-n-sniff card. The film itself dictates certain times to scratch the card, to smell what protagonist Francine Fishpaw smells. ↩︎
3. At the time of the interview, Netflix was set to acquire Warner Brothers. Now, at time of writing, Paramount is set to acquire the company instead. Read more here. ↩︎