Anna Kendrick Tells Terrifying True Story of a Serial Killer Who Appeared on a Dating Show in Woman of the Hour Trailer

Anna Kendrick steps behind the camera for her new thriller.

On Tuesday, Oct. 1, Netflix released a new trailer for Woman of the Hour, Kendrick’s directorial debut, in which she also stars as a woman who appears on the ’60s and ’70s-era game show The Dating Game — only to wind up meeting a serial killer in the midst of his infamous killing spree. 

An official logline for the movie describes the film as a “stranger-than-fiction story of an aspiring actress in 1970s Los Angeles and a serial killer in the midst of a yearslong murder spree, whose lives intersect when they’re cast on an episode of The Dating Game.”

The movie is inspired by the story of Rodney Alcala, a real-life serial killer in the 1970s. Aside from Kendrick in the lead role and in the director’s chair, the film also stars Tony Hale, Daniel Zovatto, Tony Hale, Nicolette Robinson, Pete Holmes, Autumn Best, Kathryn Gallagher and Kelley Jakle.

Kendrick’s first movie as a director premiered at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival. Though the star and director could not attend that festival due to 2023’s SAG-AFTRA strike, she said in a statement shared at the time that Woman of the Hour is the “proudest moment of my career.”

“I’m grateful to every single person who gave their energy to making this film,” she said at the time. “And I’m so excited for an audience to see their hard work on the big screen.”

Kendrick recently told Entertainment Weekly that she originally intended to star in and produce the new film and eventually stepped in as director when the film finally found a start date for production but had “no director.”

“And of course, the whole two years, I’m sitting there going, ‘Well, if it were my movie, this is how I’d do it. But it’s not, so it’s not my call,’ ” she told EW. “I just got so excited about the idea of taking this script that I loved so much and shaping it in the way that I saw it.”

Woman of the Hour begins streaming on Netflix Oct. 18.