“Buzzheart,” the latest feature from Dennis Iliadis, director of the Wes Craven remake “The Last House on the Left,” has closed North America (Dark Star Pictures) and Germany Austria, and Switzerland (Busch Media) before this year’s American Film Market.
Secured by Paris-based B-Rated International, further deals take in Brazil (Belas Arte Group) and Spanish-speaking Latin America (Dexterity Entertainment).
B-Rated International is also planning to handle the French rights on “Buzzheart” for a domestic release in early 2026. The U.K. and Ireland are currently under advanced negotiation, Arnaud Chevallier, B-Rated International CEO, told Variety.
Popular on Variety
“Buzzheart” world premiered in main competition at last year’s Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. It also played the MotelX Lisbon Intl. Horror Film Festival.
Iliadis has carved out a career trying to bring something new to genre, such as, working with Craven, more polished production values and scenes censored in the 1972 “The Last House on the Left.”
“Buzzheart” equally delivers as a genre-bending psychological mystery-thriller. Set in Iliadis’ native Greece in the 1990s, Argyris, a timid 18-year-old, visits a massage parlour where he instantly smitten by the masseuse, Mary, way out of his league. In a surprise turn, she gives him a handjob and invites him as her boyfriend to meet her parents.
Argyris can’t believe his luck. There, Mary’s mother – “the last true experimental behaviourist” says her husband, Yorgos – subjects him to increasingly bizarre and sinister challenges to prove Argyris’s love and that he is worthy of Mary. Things take a more sinister turn as Yorgos becomes increasingly violent.
As “Buzzheart” builds to a climax, however, Iliadis flips conventional genre.
“I wanted to use all the elements I’ve learned in my American films which, in the end, were getting a bit too ‘standard horrorish’ and do something ideally more deep and human,” he told Eye for Film. “Usually you have people pretending they are normal and they turn out to be weird but here the people are weird and you discover their humanity at the very end.”
“We are delighted to bring Dennis Iliadis’s new feature to such a wide range of territories and look forward to building a strong relationship with this talented filmmaker,” Chevallier told Variety. Further deals are expected to close before the end of the year, along with additional opportunities through the remake rights which B-Rated is handling in collaboration with Iliadis, he added.
“Buzzheart” is produced by Greece’s Panoply Films and Amanda Livanou’s Neda Films, with U.S-based Twin7.
It forms part of a sales slate at B-Rated International, launched in late 2024 by former Mediawan international sales- acquisitions executive Chevallier.
Further titles include 2024 Tallinn Black Nights premiere “The Exalted,” from Latvia’s “Soviet Jeans” director Juris Kursietis; Yannis Dimolitsas’ docu-drama “Maria Callas – Monica Bellucci: An Encounter,” with Bellucci exploring the life of Callas through letters and little-seen footage, and Ivana Mladenovic’s Locarno competition contender “Sorella di Clausura,” hailed by Variety as a “funny, bawdy sociosexual satire that’s as tasteful as the times we live in.”
