Anna Kendrick recently took a turn into darker subject matter with Alice, Darling, and she is following up with her directorial debut, Woman of the Hour, which will appeal to true-crime junkies and anybody who wants to have the hell scared out of them with a fear known all too well to women. Kendrick also stars as aspiring actress Cheryl Bradshaw, who went on 1970s-era The Dating Game show, and unbeknownst to everybody on set, one of the contestants happened to be Rodney Alcaca, who was later convicted and served time on death row (before dying of natural causes) after killing over 100 women.
In the above Netflix teaser, the film is previewed in a more terrifying manner than the full trailer, which held back from dropping the hammer on exactly how unsettling a portrayal that Daniel Zovatto gives as Alcaca. Kendrick’s Cheryl Bradshaw is shown on a date with Alcaca, who sets off her internal alarm bells during several jarring moments. He’s then shown insisting upon walking her home and “testing” her knowledge of a phone number that she gives him, and if you’ve read The Gift Of Fear by Gavin de Becker, then you will know precisely what this scene was meant to communicate. [Shudder]
While speaking to the New York Times (back in 2016), Kendrick named de Becker’s title as the self-help book that she finds most valuable, and Entertainment Weekly notes Kendrick’s previous words on the subject about “why women ‘reject their advances in poorly lit parking lots: it’s not because we’re bitches, it’s because we don’t want to get murdered.”
Kendrick also went in hard with EW in discussing her research of Alcaca:
[Kendrick] was able to fall back on the experiences she’d been collecting since she was a teenager … those ideas washed over her like rogue waves. While researching the story, she discovered a news report that listed the address of one of Alcala’s victims. “And I thought, I know exactly where that is,” Kendrick continues. “I had this awful feeling. ‘Oh my God, he broke in through her window, and she was on the ocean. She would’ve been hearing the ocean.’ And something about that just ruined me.”
Netflix’s Woman of the Hour will stream on October 18.