Movies
- Dirty Harry directed by Don Siegel, starring Clint Eastwood, was filmed in San Francisco and released on December 23, 1971. In the movie, which is very loosely based on the Zodiac case, the killer (played by Andrew Robinson), who calls himself "Scorpio", at certain points sends intimidating letters, with the handwriting based on the real life killer's and kidnaps a school bus full of children and threatens to kill them all.
- The Zodiac Killer, directed by Tom Hanson and starring Hal Reed and Bob Jones, was released on April 6, 1971.
- The "Gemini Killer" in the movie The Exorcist III, released on August 17, 1990, was also loosely based on the Zodiac Killer.
- The Zodiac Killer is mentioned in the film "The Addams Family Values". While at Summer camp, Wednesday, Pugsley and Joel go over a set of "Schizo's and Serial Killers" trading cards, with Joel mentioning the only cards he doesn't have are "Jack The Ripper and that Zodiac guy". Pugsley then offers to trade an Amy Fisher card for Joel's Black Widow card.
- In 2000, a short film entitled Disguised Killer was produced in Vallejo; set in the present, it is based on the Lake Herman Road murders and has a Filipino cast.
- In 2005, Lions Gate Entertainment released Zodiac Killer. Set in the modern day, the films features a nursing home employee who begins copycatting the Zodiac, angering the original killer, who is revealed to be a member of a moralistic secret society, and who has been living under the guise of Zodiac-expert Simon Vale (portrayed by writer and director Ulli Lommel). Two years later, the company released Curse of the Zodiac, a loose retelling of the original murders, also written and directed by Lommel.
- In 2006, THINKFilm released The Zodiac.
- Zodiac, directed by David Fincher, is based on the two non-fiction books by Robert Graysmith: Zodiac and Zodiac Unmasked: The Identity of America's Most Elusive Serial Killer. Filming locations included San Francisco and Los Angeles, and it opened in theaters nationwide on March 2, 2007. It stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Graysmith, Robert Downey Jr. as Avery, Mark Ruffalo as Toschi, Brian Cox as Belli, and John Carroll Lynch as Allen.
- In the 2012 movie Seven Psychopaths, there is a flashback sequence depicting Zachariah Rigby (played by Tom Waits) and his wife Maggie, who have spent their lives gruesomely murdering serial killers, arriving at the Zodiac's house, where he has been apparently farming rabbits. Maggie pins him to a table by his hands using two large knives, and burns him to death with gasoline. After witnessing this, along with many other grisly things she'd done, he tells her he can no longer continue murdering people, and she leaves him. After relaying this story to the main character, Marty, Rigby laments, "I shoulda helped her kill that hippie."
Read more about this topic: Zodiac Killer In Popular Culture
Famous quotes containing the word movies:
“Commercial jazz, soap opera, pulp fiction, comic strips, the movies set the images, mannerisms, standards, and aims of the urban masses. In one way or another, everyone is equal before these cultural machines; like technology itself, the mass media are nearly universal in their incidence and appeal. They are a kind of common denominator, a kind of scheme for pre-scheduled, mass emotions.”
—C. Wright Mills (1916–62)
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—Jeanine Basinger (b. 1936)
“The movies today are too rich to have any room for genuine artists. They produce a few passable craftsmen, but no artists. Can you imagine a Beethoven making $100,000 a year?”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)