It should have been just another silly episode of “The Dating Game.”

At a 1978 taping of the hit TV show, host Jim Lange introduced three male suitors who were adorably interrogated by a single woman, Cheryl Bradshaw, who sat on the other side of a partition.

She looked for love in the wrong places.

The studio lights came up on a long-haired man with sunken eyes and a wide grin, who the audience could see but Bradshaw could not.

“Bachelor No. 1 is a successful photographer who got his start when his father found him in the darkroom at age 13, fully developed,” Lange joked about the sexually charged ABC hit. “Between takes you might see him skydiving or riding a motorcycle. Please welcome Rodney Alcala!”

Skydiving and motorcycling were not the half of it.

Unbeknownst to Lange, Bradshaw and the game show’s producers, 35-year-old Alcala was secretly a murderer amid a prolific killing spree in New York, California and Wyoming.

Between 1971 and 1979 he claimed the lives of at least eight people – including children and a pregnant woman – but authorities estimate the actual number of his victims at more than 100.

Bradshaw almost could have become one. The woman actually chose to go on a date with the monster at the end of the episode.

A new film about Alcala, his grizzly crimes and his unusual TV appearance had its world premiere on Friday evening at the Toronto International Film Festival.

The film, called “Woman of the Hour” and directed by and starring Anna Kendrick, should bring renewed attention to the deviant who murdered his many victims in the same decade as the more infamous rampages of Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy.

“If you look back (at the ‘Dating Game’ video), the most fascinating thing is that he’s already committed a crime,” criminal profiler Pat Brown told CNN. ‘Raped a little girl. Here is a man who portrays himself as a desirable young man, when he is a violent sexual predator of children.”

How did a serial killer end up on a fun national game show?

In the days before the Internet, background checks for talent were difficult and a simple Google search was impossible. Still, the husband-and-wife producing team of Mike and Ellen Metzger initially disagreed on Alcala’s casting.

Ellen found the man attractive and charming, but Mike remembered feeling uneasy about the situation.

“He had this mystique about him that I found uncomfortable,” Mike told ABC’s “20/20.”

However, he was overruled and Alcala made the choice. Although the killer’s answers to Bradshaw were typical of the ambiguous program, in retrospect they are chilling.

“I’m serving you for dinner. What is your name and what do you look like?” the woman asked.

“My name is the banana and I look good,” Alcala replied. “Peel me.”

However, Alcala did not lie during his “Dating Game” interview. He was really a photographer. What he left out of his biography was that he used his profession to lure unsuspecting women and men to his home and then brutally murdered and sometimes raped them after the photo shoots.

Born in San Antonio, Texas, and raised in Mexico and California, Alcala is remembered by those who knew him as outgoing and with many friends.

According to the book “The Dating Game Killer: The True Story of a TV Dating Show, a Violent Sociopath, and a Series of Brutal Murders,” a professor at UCLA, where Alcala was once a student, told police that he ” wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

Like Bundy, Alcala hid his true inclinations with charisma.

His earliest known crime was the horrific attack on 8-year-old Tali Shapiro. He kidnapped the girl from her temporary family home at Chateau Marmont in 1968 by lying that he was a friend of her parents.

In his apartment he took her photo, brutally bashed her head in and almost strangled her with a barbell. Thanks to a tip, the police barely found the girl alive.

She survived and her family moved to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. But Alcala escaped through the back door and soon fled to New York, where he applied to NYU under the assumed name John Berger. There he studied film with director Roman Polanski.

While living in Manhattan, he raped and murdered TWA flight attendant Cornelia Crilley in her East 83rd Street apartment.

Alcala was added to the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List for attacking Shapiro and was spotted and arrested at a camp in New Hampshire and then extradited to California. Despite all that, he was released on parole due to an issue with a witness and allowed to leave the state.

Back in New York in 1977, he murdered Ellen Hoover, the 23-year-old daughter of the owner of Ciro’s in West Hollywood. One newspaper headline read: “Nightclub heiress is missing.”

Her bones were found eleven months later in Westchester, near the Rockefeller estate.

Alcala’s blood trail intensified in the late 1970s. In California, he murdered 18-year-old Jill Barcomb, 27-year-old nurse Georgia Wixted, 31-year-old legal secretary Charlotte Lamb, 21-year-old typist Jill Parenteau and 12-year-old Robin Samsoe. Alcala, the police heard, approached Samsoe, who was cycling to ballet class, with the offer to take a picture with her.

After filming 1978’s “The Dating Game,” Bradshaw was saved by her own instincts.

“She said, ‘Ellen, I can’t date this guy,'” Ellen Metzger recalled on ’20/20.’ “There are strange feelings coming from him. He’s very strange. I’m not at ease. Is that going to be a problem?’

Bradshaw decided not to go through with the date, and just a year later, Alcala was charged with Samsoe’s death. He was found guilty in 1980. That verdict was later overturned, the case was retried and then reaffirmed numerous times, and the killer always remained behind bars.

The true extent of his horrors only became known from 2003, when researchers began linking Alcala’s DNA to unsolved murders. In addition to his death sentence in California, he was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison in 2013 for his murders in New York.

Alcala died in 2021 at the age of 77 in a California prison from unspecified natural causes.

Matt Murphy, former deputy district attorney of Orange County, California, summed up the surreal ordeal on “20/20.”

“Looking back, it’s chilling to realize that this iconic show celebrating love and romance would unknowingly feature a ruthless killer,” he said.