Doug Wykstra
Jul 25, 2017 · 1 min read

Remember when Jake Gyllenhaal’s character goes into the house with the basement (“not many houses in San Francisco have basements”) and the creepy guy whose handwriting matches the Zodiac Killer’s, and every experience you’ve ever had with horror movies suggests that he’s going to get killed in this house, but at the same time, you know that it’s logically impossible for him to get killed, because they wouldn’t know how the scene played out if Robert Graysmith had actually been killed? So the whole scene, there’s this underlying tension where you’re wondering whether the film is going to break with its meticulous procedural recreation of the Zodiac case and turn into an ahistorical slasher flick, or whether it’s going to undercut the filmmaking by making the whole scene a red herring?

That underlying tension is what the clause is describing.

    Doug Wykstra

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