To celebrate the 25th anniversary of Se7en and the 10th anniversary of The Social Network, The Ringer dubs September 21-25 David Fincher Week to celebrate and examine the man, the myth, and his impeccable body of work.
David Fincher’s film Zodiac can be described as a serial killer film, but calling it such does the film a disservice. It’s a film about the spellbinding, haunting aspects of an unsolved crime, but is not about the crime itself. It’s a film about characters who venture down a rabbit hole, chasing an elusive monster in the dark, and the tolls such a pursuit takes.
The film’s most playfully paranoid and tension-filled scene takes place near the end of Zodiac, after Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) follows Vaughn (Charles Fleischer) to his home through the rain. Once inside, the mood quickly becomes unnerving. After disclosing that he, not Marshall, is responsible for the movie poster handwriting, Vaughn leads a spooked Graysmith down to his dimly lit basement.
The basement scene is a signature Fincher adrenaline rush-a moment buttressed by years of intensive research, attention to accuracy, and last-minute studio foresight.
The Genesis of a Nightmare: From Book to Screen
James Vanderbilt was 15 years old when he picked up Graysmith’s first book, Zodiac. Written from the cartoonist’s perspective, it unpacks all the firsthand accounts, key evidence, and investigative efforts to unmask the serial killer that terrorized Northern California through the early 1970s. Vanderbilt, an angsty high schooler aspiring to write his own crime stories, became obsessed with the book and the mysteries surrounding the Zodiac’s correspondence.
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When the rights became available in 2002, Vanderbilt pounced at the opportunity to start his dream project. Vanderbilt wanted to depict the investigation just like it occurred-an interminable slog filled with jurisdictional impasses and zero resolution. He then sent Graysmith a letter professing his love for the book. Graysmith liked his vision, and the fact that Vanderbilt and Fischer assured they would adapt Zodiac and its follow-up, Zodiac Unmasked, with the necessary scrupulousness.
To develop the script, the pair spoke with numerous sources, including lead investigator, Dave Toschi (played by Mark Ruffalo in the movie), who showed them around the murder locations for a full geographic audit. Inspired by HBO’s The Wire, Vanderbilt took a “nuts and bolts” approach to the drama, gleaning the minute details of each police report, warrant request, and handwritten note.
Fincher had grown up around the Zodiac’s hoopla, and remembered highway patrol officers following his school bus for weeks after the killer had threatened to bomb one. Intrigued by the script’s investigative approach and ambiguous ending, he conditionally agreed to start the project, expressing the need to use everyone’s real name and present all the facts.
In the next 18 months, the trio turned into a group of determined sleuths. They interviewed suspects, spoke with ex-officers, and tracked down surviving victims; they sifted through 10,000 pages of documents and evidence; they filled timelines with notes, ciphers, and photos. Every date needed to be correct, and every eyewitness account needed cross-checking.
Once the necessary information had been processed through lawyers, Fincher officially came aboard and financing began in earnest. Although the script had undergone a variety of extensive changes, the only scene that remained mostly untouched was Graysmith’s visit with Vaughn.
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To enhance the paranoia on the page, Fincher cast Gyllenhaal as Graysmith, thanks in part to a recommendation from Jennifer Aniston, who had worked with the actor on The Good Girl. His bug-eyed features matched the quiet and calculating rhythms of Fleischer, who nailed his audition for Vaughn. The comic actor, famous for voicing Roger Rabbit, was an easy choice for Fincher.
Like the scene’s placement in the movie, Graysmith and Vaughn’s encounter would occur late into production. And even after filming multiple murders, Fincher knew the scene would be the drama’s most nerve-wracking moment, a blind-alley climax filled with the horror tropes Fincher had omitted to that point.
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Crafting the Atmosphere: Set Design and Cinematography
By the third act of Zodiac, Graysmith’s fear and restlessness has grown to dangerous levels. By the time he greets Vaughn and follows him home, Graysmith is fully convinced he’ll find his smoking gun. Fincher wanted the interiors of Vaughn’s home to have movable walls and flexible furniture, allowing cinematographer Harris Savides to capture the angles he needed.
Taking measurements from the house’s exterior, Burt and his construction team matched the door’s hardware, building a 4-foot elevated entryway, hall, and kitchen. Burt didn’t want to fill Vaughn’s old home with only period-specific appliances, an ideal that mimicked Fincher’s obsessive need for accuracy. It helped that Fincher had mapped how the scene would move and which pieces of furniture and colors would accentuate his sickly aesthetic.
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As the scene unfolds in the kitchen, Vaughn makes tea and stands behind his counter while Graysmith sits down to discuss his host’s connection with Marshall. Throughout their conversation, Fincher positions his camera at his protagonist’s eye level-establishing a noticeable power dynamic-before Vaughn opens up. He admits knowledge of his colleague’s film canisters and then drops the bomb about his handwriting.
Then, in a chilling shot, Fincher zooms into Gyllenhaal’s face, framing a blurred Fleischer just above his shoulder. With panic now palpable, Vaughn asks Graysmith to follow him downstairs to examine his film records, a request punctuated with an inspired callback. In one of his early letters, the Zodiac had mentioned having a basement, a small detail that Vanderbilt had inserted into a previous conversation to set up this specific interaction.
When Fincher began scouting basements, he found inspiration inside Dermot Mulroney’s home. Like the upstairs set, Burt recreated the look of the basement on the same soundstage, starting on the floor and building a staircase to connect the two halves of the scene.
Indeed, the setting feels like a scary movie cliché-the space is dark and grimy, floorboards drip and creak, and just a couple of 60-watt lightbulbs brighten spiderwebs and the dusty shelves of film canisters. Because Zodiac was the first movie shot and produced entirely in digital, the production’s innovative Viper cameras allowed Savides to shoot comfortably with minimal ... The director rarely lets his films slip into full-on gore, but the possibilities he creates within his viewers’ imaginations are even more disturbing.
The Unseen Threat: Psychological Horror
In Robert Graysmith’s exhaustive search to unmask the Zodiac Killer, he meets a man who supposedly has a tip about the serial killer’s true identity, only to discover that two potential clues he had for the Zodiac-that the killer likely owned a basement, which is rare in California, and that he had a distinctive style of handwriting-are right in front of him.
That Graysmith is successfully lured into the man’s basement on a dark and stormy night only heightens the feeling that something really bad is going to happen. Obsessive curiosity and the search for truth supplant fear and Graysmith’s own survival instinct. If you’ve seen Zodiac, you already know that Graysmith doesn’t meet his end in that basement-nor does the film offer any definitive answers about the identity of the most enigmatic serial killer of the 20th century.
But consider Fincher’s masterful, dread-inducing buildup to that basement scene as the ultimate flex: In a movie where multiple Zodiac Killer victims are shown stabbed, shot, and killed on-screen, Zodiac’s most enduring moment of terror is a sly misdirect.
As Graysmith makes a run for the door, only to find it locked, we as viewers feel our own sense of panic and anxiety reaching a panicked crescendo. When Vaughn suddenly appears behind him, the enveloping darkness and the tense score make his entrance feel like a horror film scare, even though there is no evidence to back up this perception. As Graysmith flees from Vaughn’s house into a rain-soaked night, the audience shares his relief, but there really was nothing threatening in Vaughn’s dark basement.
Fincher ends his film with one of the Zodiac’s surviving victim identifying Arthur Leigh Allen (a favorite Zodiac suspect) as the man who tried to kill him, but it still feels as uncertain as the film that preceded it. There’s no concrete confession nor triumphant arrest. As the film draws to a close, Fincher makes it clear that all that remains is the obsession and paranoia that has dogged his characters.
The Real Zodiac Killer: Suspects and Theories
Thousands of men have been named as a possible suspect for the Zodiac Killer, an unidentified serial killer active between December 1968 and October 1969. The Zodiac murdered five known victims in the San Francisco Bay Area, operating in rural, urban, and suburban settings. He targeted three young couples and a lone male cab driver.
While many theories regarding the identity of the Zodiac have been suggested, the only suspect authorities ever publicly named was Arthur Leigh Allen, a former elementary school teacher and convicted sex offender who died in 1992. The Zodiac Killer claimed in messages to newspapers to have committed thirty-seven murders.
Some letters included cryptograms or ciphers; of the four codes he produced, two remain unsolved while the others were cracked in 1969 and 2020. The last confirmed Zodiac letter was sent in 1974, in which he claimed to have killed thirty-seven victims.
Here's a brief overview of some named suspects:
| Suspect | Details |
|---|---|
| Arthur Leigh Allen | Teacher and convicted child molester. Publicly named suspect, but excluded by DNA and fingerprints. |
| Gary Francis Poste | Named by the Case Breakers in 2021. The FBI stated that the case remained open and that there were "no new information to report". |
| Richard Marshall | Ham radio operator and movie projectionist. Lived in a basement apartment, which the Zodiac mentioned. |
| Ross Sullivan | Library assistant at Riverside City College. Resembled sketches of the Zodiac, but no concrete evidence. |
| Jack Tarrance | Kaufman said Tarrance resembled the composite sketch, and he also claimed to have a stash of incriminating evidence. |