Beyond Clueless

The director just wanted to test a new camera and use an expired 16mm film stock. Seeing his crew out of ideas, Charlie Shackleton tells an amusing family story involving a 1963 Cadbury ad. 

Charlie Shackleton explores a possible vein of inspiration for one of the most successful horror films in American cinema, Wes Craven’s iconic Scream (1996): an obscure film by Rolfe Kanefsky, There’s Nothing Out There, which works in the same metatextual universe that winks at the horror genre.

Signing briefly as Charlie Lyne, Shackleton travels through a plethora of horror films (apart from the opening and closing sequences). It comprises material from other films (classic, cult, etc.) to explore the viewer’s relationship with fear and cinema. 

A film that threads the blurred line between documentary and fiction to explore a story that seems to be more myth than reality: Caspar Salmon tells us how, in 1980, he attended a meeting on an island in Wales where only people with surnames related to fish were present.

A look at Operation Scanner, during Margaret Thatcher’s final days in power, a case where the police arrested 16 men convicted of the crime of filming consensual behavior linked to sadomasochism. Their story has been told by everyone but themselves. 

Poet and artist Ross Sutherland and his parents were watching an episode of the British soap opera EastEnders when they were interrupted, and they never finished it. This film revisits that episode twenty years later. 

*Screened as an installation in the Rank Room, with free admission and the director’s occasional presence Paint Drying (an expression that refers to the most boring activity imaginable) is a cheeky protest against the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), a board that assigns a compulsory classification to all films that want to be exhibited in the UK, charging an excessive fee that weighs mainly heavily on independent filmmakers. Shackleton made the film (with the help of a crowdfunding campaign) specifically to force the BBFC to sit for 607 minutes, without audio, looking at a static shot of paint drying on a brick wall.

A film that was inspired by Pizzagate, one of the most absurd conspiracy theories that came out of the 2016 US elections between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, and which leads Charlie Shackleton to take a theory from his youth in order to explore notions of scepticism. 

Just as it was never proven who the Zodiac Killer was, so was Charlie Shackleton unable to move forward with the big screen adaptation of the book The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge by Lyndon E. Lafferty, who believed he knew the identity of the elusive criminal. But that didn’t stop Shackleton from making a movie-about-the-movie-he-would’ve-made, in a cinematic evocation of the true crime genre. Zodiac Killer Project is imaginative, intriguing and a masterful deconstruction that includes the most beautiful sunset.