The crimes of serial killer Rodney Alcala have been transformed into a new Netflix movie, and the story truly is stranger - and more terrifying - than fiction.
Alcala, who died in prison in 2021, was eventually found guilty of eight murders across California, New York, and Wyoming between 1971 and 1979, although it’s thought he may have killed more than 100 women and girls.
In the midst of his killing spree, he’d brazenly appeared on a TV dating show - something that earned him his ‘Dating Game Killer’ nickname.
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He was one of three bachelors lined up as a potential suitor for singleton Cheryl Bradshaw in a 1978 episode of The Dating Game.
The concept of the programme, which was similar to the UK’s Blind Date, saw Bradshaw ask a series of questions to a trio of men, who only the studio audience and viewers at home are able to see, before picking her favourite.
The footage now is particularly unnerving, given the chilling first nine words he said to Bradshaw as the programme kicked off:
“We’re going to have a great time together, Cheryl,” he told her from behind the screen as the game started.
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She ended up picking Alcala, but later decided not to go ahead with the date after a ‘creepy’ conversation with him backstage.
"I started to feel ill,” Bradshaw told the Sydney Telegraph in 2012.
“He was acting really creepy."
Just two years after their encounter, Alcala was convicted of murdering a 12-year-old girl.
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The harrowing story is now the subject of new Netflix film, Woman of the Hour, directed by Anna Kendrick, who also portrays Bradshaw.
In an interview with Deadline, she discussed how she approached the movie’s inevitable violence, having wanted to rely on a ‘less explicit’ style.
“I knew that I wanted to kind of use the model of No Country for Old Men … where it’s a descending scale of violence,” Kendrick explained.
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“So you kind of get something that makes you squirm out of the way in the first scene so that you can kind of rely on the audience using their imagination for everything else and you can become less and less explicit as the movie goes on.
“And even in the opening scene, I had shot two other setups that just kind of gave you more of a sense of the geography and the reality of what was happening.”
Kendrick said she asked her editor to ‘go back through’ some of the footage where they had ‘just rolled on before the actors came to set that morning’.
"And we found that panning role focus shot,” she continued.
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“And I was like, ‘What if we just hear it?’ Because I think your imagination is always gonna be worse in some ways.
"But also I don’t like showing this, and I did have this impulse to kind of contrast the beauty of the setting almost as a representation of the beauty of this woman’s whole life that she had before this moment and that she deserves to live after this moment as just kind of a backdrop for what we understand is happening.”
Woman of the Hour is available to stream on Netflix now.
Topics: True Crime, Netflix, TV And Film
Jess Hardiman