Buzzheart, the latest feature from the Blumhouse-backed director of Delirium and Wes Craven’s The Last House remake, Buzzheart, has completed screenings in North America (Dark Star Pictures), Germany/Austria, and Switzerland (Busch Media) ahead of this year’s American Film Market.
It has been secured by Paris-based B-Rated International, with further deals in Brazil (Belas Arte Group) and Spanish-speaking Latin America (Dexterity Entertainment).
B-Rated International will also handle the French rights to “Buzzheart” for domestic release in early 2026. Negotiations are currently underway in the UK and Ireland, B-Rated International CEO Arnaud Chevallier told Variety.
“Buzzheart” had its world premiere in the main competition section of the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival last year. We also played at Motel X Lisbon International Airport. Horror film festival.
Iliadis has made a career out of working with Craven to bring something new to the genre, including fancier production values and censored scenes in 1972’s The Last House on the Left.
“Buzzheart” similarly functions as a genre-bending psychological mystery thriller. Set in Iliadis’ home country of Greece in the 1990s, Argyris, a shy 18-year-old, visits a massage parlor where he falls in love at first sight with Mary, a substandard masseuse. In a surprise twist, she gives him a handjob and invites him as her boyfriend to meet her parents.
Argyris can’t believe his good fortune. There, Mary’s mother – described by her husband Yorgos as “the last true experimental behaviorist” – challenges Mary to increasingly bizarre and sinister challenges to prove Argyris’ love and that she is worthy of Mary. Things take a more sinister turn as Yorgos becomes increasingly violent.
But as “Buzzheart” builds to its climax, Iliadis turns conventional genre on its head.
“I wanted to use all the elements I learned from American films, but in the end it ended up being a little too ‘standard horror’ and ideally I wanted to create something deeper and more human,” he told Eye for Film. “Usually you have people pretending to be normal and they turn out to be strange, but here people are strange and their humanity is discovered at the very end.”
“We are thrilled to be able to bring Denis Iliadis’ new work to such a wide geographic audience and look forward to building a strong relationship with this talented filmmaker,” Chevalier told Variety. Further deals are expected to be completed by the end of the year, with additional opportunities through remake rights that B-Rated is handling in conjunction with Iliadis, he added.
Buzzheart is produced by Greece’s Panoply Films and director Amanda Libanou’s Neda Films in collaboration with US-based Twin7.
This will form part of B-Rated International’s sales plan, which will be launched in late 2024 by Media One’s former international sales and acquisitions executive Chevalier.
Other titles include the 2024 Tallinn Black Nights premiere, “The Exalted,” from Latvian “Soviet Jeans” director Julis Krsietis; Giannis Dimolitsas’s docudrama Maria Callas – Monica Bellucci: An Encounter (Bellucci explores Callas’s life through letters and rarely seen footage), and Ivana Mladenovic’s Locarno Competition candidate Solella di Clausura (Variety described it as “a funny and bawdy social satire as tasteful as the times in which we live”).
