A new film – “The Night Stalker,” starring Lou Diamond Phillips as Richard Ramirez – is set to premiere in Orange County in early June after producers decided the movie should be seen in an area that the serial killer terrorized in 1985.

“We wanted to open in a place where he had an impact,” producer Matt Brady said.

The film will be screened at The Frida Cinema, the art house theater in downtown Santa Ana, about 20 miles from the Mission Viejo neighborhood where Ramirez committed the last of his horrific crimes during the summer of 1985. The date of the premiere has yet to be determined as Brady’s production company tries to firm up a date that Phillips, who is on location shooting the television show “Longmire,” can attend.

The film will be shown at festivals around the United States in search of a distribution deal before it can open in wider release.

Ramirez was convicted of 13 murders and 11 sexual assaults. Most of the crimes, in which he broke into homes in the middle of the night, occurred between March and September of ’85, when people from San Francisco to San Diego went to bed afraid. He made some of his victims pledge their allegiance to Satan. Newspapers dubbed Ramirez “The Night Stalker,” after a creepy but unrelated television series in the 1970s.

In Mission Viejo on Aug. 24, 1985, Ramirez was spotted by teenager James Romero III on Via Zaragosa. Romero gave police a description of Ramirez’s orange car and a partial license plate number. Hours later, Ramirez broke into the home of Bill Carns on Chrisanta Drive.

Ramirez shot Carns three times in the head and raped Carns’ girlfriend. Carns miraculously survived, although severe brain injuries make his life extremely difficult.

Thanks to Romero’s description and a media blitz by police, Ramirez was caught six days later by an angry mob in East L.A.

The movie focuses on a fictionalized story in which an attorney (Bellamy Young, who plays Mellie Grant on the popular television show “Scandal”) tries to persuade a dying Ramirez to confess to a crime from his early years in Texas to save another man from death row. The real Ramirez died of complications from B-cell lymphoma on June 7, 2013, while awaiting execution in San Quentin State Prison.

Flashbacks from Mission Viejo are in the film, and not everyone will be happy to see those images on the big screen.

“Who would want to go see that?” said Anne Carns, the 88-year-old mother of Bill Carns, now 60, who still carries one of Ramirez’s bullets in his head. “Bill’s short-term memory is very bad. He showers once a week because he forgets. He doesn’t take his meds. I won’t go see it because I know what Bill goes through every day.”

A suburban street in Van Nuys served as a stand-in for Chrisanta Drive in Mission Viejo.

Van Nuys was chosen as the location in the summer of 2015 because of its streetlights, which were old school sodium vapor lamps – not the LED lamps that are used in most places today.

Director Megan Griffiths, who also wrote the screenplay for the film, insisted that all the flashback scenes be accurate.

“Shooting in the period (1985) is really hard,” Brady said. “You have to have the right cars, signage, backgrounds and street lamps.”

Griffiths said she has known about the Night Stalker since she was 10 years old.

“He was my introduction to evil in the world,” Griffiths said. “For this film, I didn’t want to just follow around an actor re-creating gruesome scenes. I was more interested in his psychology.“

The Van Nuys house is the residence of a woman who alleged she saw the Night Stalker in the bushes outside the house in 1985.

Brady said Phillips, who achieved stardom playing Ritchie Valens in “La Bamba,” did a scary and credible job re-creating Richard Ramirez. A dentist fitted Phillips with fake teeth to emulate Ramirez’s infamous rotting smile.

“He’s fantastic,” Brady said. “Everyone who saw him just got the chills. He nails the voice.”

The film is the most recent of several depictions of the infamous serial killer and his crimes. “Manhunt: Search for the Night Stalker” was a television movie from 1989. “Nightstalker” was a straight-to-video movie in 2009.

Brady, who also produced the film “Dahmer” starring Jeremy Renner, said the Night Stalker case got under the skin of so many people because Ramirez’s modus operandi was unpredictable.

“He used a knife. He used a gun,” Brady said. “His victims were old and young. He traveled from Northern California to Southern California. He had no particular MO.”

Brady said “The Night Stalker” is a significant film because almost the entire crew is made up of women. The writer/director, film editor, director of photography and one of the producers are women.

“That’s a rarity in Hollywood,” he said.