The Zodiac Killer (1971) is one of those films where the story behind it is just as interesting as the story it tells. At the height of the Zodiac’s reign of terror, Tom Hanson left a pizza franchise to make a film to catch the killer. Hanson believed that the serial killer would be unable to resist going to see a film that dramatized his exploits in carnage. Unfortunately Hanson’s plan didn’t work and the Zodiac killer went loose.
Despite its obviously modest budget, Hanson created a film of epic ambitions. Hanson studied every news item about the murders in order to extract details to help make The Zodiac Killer as authentic as possible. Of course at the time the police investigating these serial murders were withholding a great deal of information about the crimes. So in order to flesh out a more complete portrait of the killer and the crime scenes, Hanson seemingly turned to the old reliable rumor mill.
The occult figures largely in Hanson’s version of the killer; tapping into that part of the counterculture that presumably spawned the Manson family and heavy metal. Hanson mined the zeitgeist further when he made the killer a postman and a passionate caretaker of rabbits. For Hanson the Zodiac killer wasn’t just misguided or a pervert, he was also caught in a kind of arrested development.
The resulting concoction that blends fact with fantastic rumors is executed in the broadest style imaginable. The camera work is clumsy, the editing amateurish and the acting is all larger than life in The Zodiac Killer. The Zodiac Killer lives in the aesthetic middle ground between the films of Ed Wood and of Ron Ormond. It’s Hanson’s passion for the project that keeps the film together like glue on a paper ship.
Admittedly The Zodiac Killer is of more interest as a historical curio than as a work of cinematic form. Far more than Fincher’s Zodiac (2007) or Siegel’s Dirty Harry (1971), The Zodiac Killer represents the panic and fear that gripped the Bay Area in the late sixties and early seventies. There’s a real earnestness to Hanson’s sweaty little exercise in campy exploitation filmmaking that makes watching The Zodiac Killer compulsory viewing. It also helps that more often than not The Zodiac Killer is unintentionally pretty hilarious.
