SPOILER ALERT: This story contains mild spoilers for “Woman of the Hour,” now streaming on Netflix.

“Woman of the Hour” screenwriter Ian McDonald faced a unique challenge with his second feature: telling a true crime story that felt “necessary and useful.” Fortunately, the stranger-than-fiction story of Rodney Alcala, who won “The Dating Game” during a 1978 performance during a series of killings, was ripe for exploration.

“There are many cases where a serial killer attacks a group of women, and there is absolutely no reason to tell,” McDonald says. “There was something about this that felt like it could be socially and culturally relevant now. Sometimes you hear people say, “Rodney looks a bit like Ted Bundy,” by which I think they mean he’s handsome and well-educated. But he was actually very different: he was a chameleon. He was good at pretending to be something he wasn’t. That’s exactly what I found interesting, because it was the culture that routinely looked the other way, and that made it possible.”

The film, directed by Anna Kendrick, who also stars as Cheryl, an actress Alcala picks to win the game show, debuted to great success at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival and premiered on Netflix on October 18. Days later the film is in theaters. topping the streaming service’s list of most-watched films, which could be evidence of a compelling story mixed with unconventional storytelling.

McDonald says a key element in creating the script was limiting the victim interactions he wanted to portray, as Alcala may have killed as many as 130 people.

“That was what changed the most during the development of this,” he says. “It was less about ‘Which victim do we want to write about in terms of the person?’ and more than that, the way you open and close a film thematically says a lot about the film’s intentions, and has enormous dramatic impact. You can do it chronologically, starting with his earliest murder, and then moving on to his most recent. You can do it thematically and find specific events that you think build on each other in a revealing way, or are character-based. How does each crime reveal something new about the killer? It was a cross between the last two – that’s kind of where we ended up.

While recreating the murders, McDonald and Kendrick deliberately do not want to show an unnecessary amount of violence, but also do not want to sanitize McDonald’s heinous crimes.

“Each of the moments of violence was something that really worried me, because this (David Fincher’s influential 1995 crime thriller) is not ‘Seven’. I love ‘Seven,’ but in this film, simply because it’s a true crime story, you work knowing that these were real people,” he says. “They had families and their world was taken from them. You want to make sure you do it in a way that responsibly reveals the killer for what he was, and accurately reflects the darkness he represents, without being gratuitous. It’s a difficult line to walk, but it was something I took very seriously. There was a lot of “Add that line, cut that line” cropping and moving to make sure the story was all there.

That empathy for the victims also echoed in the script’s perspective, as characters engage in Alcala’s increasingly sinister nice act. One standout scene – in which Cheryl leaves a bar with Alcala and then walks away as he casually follows behind her – was written with empathy by McDonald.

“Men also find themselves in compromising situations, usually with other men,” he says. “You know when things suddenly feel awkward and awkward, and perhaps threatening. I’ve been in some scary situations, so I could draw somewhat on my personal experience in that regard. But it’s also not the same because I’m 6 feet, 200 pounds. By definition it will always be different. At that point it comes down to just listening. In the very early stages of writing this, I reached out to a bunch of girlfriends and said, “Hey, can we go to lunch? Can you tell me stories about your experiences where you would go on a date and it would feel threatening or upsetting? What did that actually look like?” That is something we paid more and more attention to during the development of the script.”

In addition to this involvement, McDonald says Kendrick also actively participated in exploring the film’s themes with him.

“There was one scene between the hitchhiker and Rodney,” McDonald says. “Anna looked at the script and said, ‘I really like that you’re writing her with so much agency, but you have to give her less because right now she’s being very outspoken and quite combative with him. The truth is that we have to do this dance of being polite and calming down, but without contradicting them.” At that point, you just listen to people who have experiences that you don’t have, and try to be honest and make sure it gets into the document.

Watch the trailer for ‘Woman of the Hour’ below.