Watch the Real Footage of the Dating Game Serial Killer That Inspired Anna Kendrick’s Directorial Debut

Anna Kendrick is directing her first movie, and the basis for it is one of the creepiest true crime stories in modern history. That might sound like an exaggeration, but what if I provide the Mediaite audience with some actual footage of one of the subjects and a woman who probably narrowly escaped becoming one of his victims?

Woman of the Hour, starring and directed by Kendrick, follows the story of Cheryl Bradshaw, an aspiring actor trying to make it in disco-era Hollywood. Bradshaw eventually agrees to appear on the saucy game show The Dating Game to get herself some visibility and show off her charming personality. It’s there that she crosses paths with eligible bachelor Rodney Alcala. What she doesn’t know is that by the time Alcala took his seat on that legendary turntable set, he was well on his way to becoming one of America’s most well-known serial killers.

The movie is a dramatized version of Bradshaw’s experience, told in parallel with what Alcala was doing at the time, which was telling women he was a photographer, luring them to remote locations, and raping and killing them. He was found guilty of seven murders but may have been responsible for many, many more. The paths of Bradshaw and Alcala intersect in September 1978, when their episode of The Dating Game was recorded.

But Bradshaw, despite choosing “Bachelor Number One” after her blind questioning, sensed something was up with Alcala when she laid eyes on him, and the two potential lovebirds would not make it to Magic Mountain to kick off their romantic adventure. (Probably too many witnesses for Alcala’s taste.) Bradshaw contacted Dating Game contestant coordinator Ellen Metzger to back out of her date with Alcala, telling Metzger, “I can’t go out with this guy. There’s weird vibes that are coming off of him. He’s very strange. I am not comfortable.”

So Bradshaw and Alcala went their separate ways. Bradshaw kept a low profile. In Alcala’s case, he continued to assault and murder women. He was convicted in 1980 for the kidnapping and murder of Robin Samsoe, who was 12 years old when she went missing in 1979 after riding her bike to a ballet lesson. Alcala was sentenced to death. A few overturned convictions and new trials later, his DNA was connected to the deaths of Jill Barcomb, Georgia Wixted, Charlotte Lamb, and Jill Parenteau, and he was convicted of their murders and Samsoe’s in 2010. Alcala was also investigated by cold case squads in New York in connection to the earlier murders of Cornelia M. Crilley and Ellen Jane Hover; he pleaded guilty to their murders in 2013.

Rodney Alcala died on death row in 2021.