Don Kaye Mar 2, 2019

Why David Fincher’s masterpiece about the Zodiac Killer still haunts us all these years later.

David Fincher’s Zodiac is now over ten years old. The two-hour-and-38-minute film follows the years-long investigation by police and journalists of the Zodiac Killer, a serial murderer who killed five people and injured two others during a spree that stretched across 1968 and 1969 in northern California. The Zodiac may have also been responsible for a number of other killings, going back as far as 1963 and as late as 1972, but those have never been confirmed. The Zodiac himself, who wrote a series of letters to the press, was never captured and a long list of suspects that have surfaced over the years has yet to yield a conclusive answer to the question of his identity.

Fincher’s goal with Zodiac was not to make a fast-paced, grisly thriller like his earlier classic,...