Footwear similarly looms large in the Zodiac mythology.
Later she said she believed the man who abducted her matched a police sketch of the alleged Zodiac Killer.Īll we see of the driver in the opening scene of The Little Things is his boots, which thus becomes a central lead in the case. She then flagged down a passing car and truck. But after 90 minutes of driving past gas stations without stopping, Johns realized it was a kidnapping and she jumped with her daughter in her arms out of the car at a stop light. The man returned, offering to take her to a service station. But as soon as Johns got back on the road, the wheel nearly fell off her car, leaving her disabled.
After he said he’d tighten the lugnuts for her, he drove off. She was 22-years-old, seven months pregnant, and driving her 10-month-old infant daughter when a man on the highway flashed his lights, encouraging her to pull over because he claimed one of her tires appeared to be loose. The opening sequence of the new film shows a woman driving while singing along with the B-52’s hit “Roam.” Right down to the camera’s close-up of the driver, the moment works as a blatant tribute to the scene in The Silence of the Lambs where we follow Buffalo Bill’s next victim, Catherine Martin (Brooke Smith), and the giddy abandon she puts behind her rendition of Tom Petty’s “American Girls.”īut it also recalls the nearly disastrous incident which happened to Kathleen Johns on March 22, 1970. The Little Things is neither a retelling nor an allegory of the Zodiac Killer investigation, but there are many similarities and seeming influences. The kind, who, like Jared Leto’s Albert Sparma in The Little Things, can’t let the little things go. In the near 20 years between the script’s first draft and the film’s final edit, one of those cases has been closed the other remains open and both continue to fascinate, frustrate, and horrify investigators, family members of victims, and a specific type of crime buff. Yet several ongoing serial killer investigations during the time of his writing raises questions about whether this intent was partially influenced by two open-ended searches for serial killers. In a recent interview with The Wrap, Hancock said “the whole reason I wrote the script” was to lean into the ambiguity and frustration of criminal investigations.
The film even mentions the Night Stalker, aka Richard Ramirez, all while stopping short of naming names or committing to a specific lethal predator in its own yarn. However, there are similarities to several well known cases. It was a 1993 screenplay penned by writer-director John Lee Hancock. You can read our spoiler-free review here.ĭespite what those looking for clear answers after that ending might hope, The Little Things is not based on any specific true story or serial killer investigation.
These can co-exist, and the nuance between them is part of why we love movies-different projects, and different moods, can look at similar topics and handle them so very differently.Īnd that's why we did the heavy lifting for you, and rounded up the best serial killer movies of all time, with some funny, some scary, and some based right here in our own reality.This article contains The Little Things spoilers. It doesn't make one less chilling and disturbing, and it doesn't make others any less fun. And sometimes you want to watch a horror villain do his thing. Sometimes you're looking for that intense mood, maybe based on a true, unsolved story. It's not a real genre, but there are a lot of different interpretations of what a 'serial killer movie' can be. It could also go a different direction, to something veering closer to fiction, like John Carpenter's original Halloween or the campy Friday the 13th. It could go, first, to a masterful telling of a real-life serial killer, like David Fincher's Zodiac. 'Serial Killer Movies' is an interesting term, because it's not a cut and dry genre to define, like, say, 'comedy' or 'horror.' When you hear about a serial killer movie, your mind could go in a few different directions.