It was supposed to be just another silly episode of The Dating Game.

At a 1978 taping of the popular TV show, host Jim Lange introduced three male suitors who were there to be politely questioned by a single woman, Cheryl Bradshaw, who was sitting on the other side of a partition.

She was looking for love in all the wrong places.

The studio lights fell on a long-haired man with deep-set 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 fully developed in the darkroom at the age of 13,” Lange joked about the sexually charged ABC hit. “In between shots you might see him skydiving or riding a motorbike. Please welcome Rodney Alcala!”

Skydiving and motorcycling weren't half of it.

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

Between 1971 and 1979 it claimed the lives of at least eight people – including children and a pregnant woman – but authorities estimate the actual number of its victims to be over 100.

Bradshaw almost became one. At the end of the episode, the woman actually decided to go on a date with the monster.

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

The film is titled “Woman of the Hour” and is directed by and stars Anna Kendrick. It aims to bring new attention to the deviant who killed his many victims in the same decade as the more infamous killing sprees of Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy.

“If you watch the 'Dating Game' video again, the most fascinating thing is that he has 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 while being a violent child sex offender.”

How did a serial killer end up on a national entertainment show?

In the days before the internet, background checks on talent were difficult and a simple Google search was impossible. Nevertheless, the production couple Mike and Ellen Metzger initially did not agree on the cast of Alcala.

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

“There was something mysterious about him that made me uncomfortable,” Mike told ABC's “20/20.”

However, he was outvoted and Alcala made the breakthrough. While the killer's on-air responses to Bradshaw were typical of the ambiguous program, they seem chilling in retrospect.

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

“I’m called the Banana and I’m good looking,” Alcala replied. “Peel me.”

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

Alcala was born in San Antonio, Texas and grew up in Mexico and California. Those who knew him remember him as outgoing and having 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 officers that he would “do it would 'do no harm to a fly.'

Like Bundy, Alcala hid his true inclinations with charisma.

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

He took a photo of her in his apartment, brutally bashed her head and almost strangled her with a dumbbell. Thanks to a tip, the police discovered the girl barely 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 false 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 apartment on East 83rd Street.

Alcala was placed on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list for the attack on Shapiro. He was discovered and arrested at a camp in New Hampshire and then extradited to California. Despite all this, he was paroled and allowed to leave the state due to an argument with a witness.

Back in New York in 1977, he killed Ellen Hoover, the 23-year-old daughter of the owner of Ciro's in West Hollywood. A newspaper headline said: “Nightclub heiress missing.”

Her bones were found 11 months later in Westchester near the Rockefeller estate.

Alcala's blood trail increased 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 stenographer Jill Parenteau and 12-year-old Robin Samsoe. Police learned that Alcala approached Samsoe, who was riding her bike to ballet class, and offered to take her photo.

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 to “20/20.” “There are strange vibrations coming from him. He is very strange. I don't feel well. Will that be a problem?'

Bradshaw decided not to keep the date, and just a year later Alcala was charged with Samsoe's death. He was found guilty in 1980. This verdict was later overturned, the case was retried and subsequently confirmed several times, and the murderer always remained behind bars.

The true extent of his horrors only became known in 2003, when investigators 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 for his murders in New York in 2013.

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

Matt Murphy, a former assistant district attorney for Orange County, California, summarized the surreal ordeal on “20/20.”

“Looking back, it is shocking to realize that this iconic show that celebrates love and romance unwittingly features a ruthless killer,” he said.