Format: DVD from personal collection on laptop.
It seems strange when looking at a list of horror films to be watching a film that is essentially a straight crime drama. Zodiac is based on the actual case of the Zodiac killer in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I’ve said before in regard to the They Shoot Zombies list that when you get down toward the bottom of the list, you get three things—underknown horror movies, horror movies that aren’t really that good, and movies that aren’t really horror. That’s clearly the case with Zodiac. There are horror elements here, but this is a crime drama more than it is anything else.
Zodiac is also a film that makes a turn in terms of genre at some point, and I’m not exactly clear where that happens. The opening part of the film is very much a serial killer movie. In fact, the film opens with an attack on a couple (the guy survives), and another follows not too long behind. There’s a vague feeling of a film like The Silence of the Lambs in this part as we deal with the murders and slowly start to get a feel for both the police investigation and the pursuit of the story by the San Francisco Chronicle. As the film continues and the mocking letters from the killer to the press change and slow down, it becomes much more about the investigation.
