HOLLYWOOD HILLS, the upcoming cosmic horror feature from writer-director Benjamin Rozovas, is being built in an unusual order. Before the film shoots, its story is launching as a real experience in the city it is set in: a nighttime bus tour of Hollywood’s true celebrity deaths, staged by the director and run in partnership with Grave Line Tours, the Los Angeles operator of the city’s death routes.
Rozovas describes HOLLYWOOD HILLS as a portrait of an aging Hollywood facing its own reckoning. Set over a single night on a Los Angeles death tour called ‘Dead & Famous’, the film follows the tour bus through the Hills, past the sites of celebrity murders and the hidden addresses the maps leave out. As a dying star hangs over the city, the bus veers off route and into a dreadful underworld that holds the truth about Hollywood’s secret buried history.
This October, the bus tour depicted in the upcoming film launches for real. Riders will take the same route the film’s characters take, past the same houses, to the same tragic deaths: Ramon Novarro, Peg Entwistle, Dorothy Stratten. Somewhere along the way, the tour stops being a regular Grave Line tour and slides into the film’s universe. The film’s characters appear at certain stops, engaging the tour passengers in the tradition of street theater. The tour is staged by Rozovas himself, and what happens on that tour will become part of the film’s lore. The audience is inside the story before a single frame is shot, and the story grows with them until it reaches the screen. The tour will be open to the public at Grave Line Tours.
“There’s a four-minute sequence in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive where the camera, slightly elevated, follows a limousine at night through the Hills. The astral viewpoint on the funeral cavalcade is meant to inspire fear of the unknown, but also a kind of fondness for the unknown. You wish for the ride to last. You don’t want to arrive. It’s beautiful and unending, and it doesn’t need to be more than that. I wanted more of that feeling, because you can never have enough. So I dreamed up this film,” said Rozovas.
Rozovas has described the film as a portrait of an aging Hollywood facing its own reckoning. He spent two decades as a film journalist for GQ and Première, living between Paris and Los Angeles, before building games on genre IP including The Walking Dead and directing the short ‘Sam & Julia’. HOLLYWOOD HILLS is his feature debut.
HOLLYWOOD HILLS was announced at Cannes in 2024 and is now fully teamed. Harrison Allen produces. He was co-executive producer of the Academy Award-winning short ‘The Singers’, released by Netflix, and his credits include the Shudder Original The Last Thing Mary Saw, which premiered at Fantasia in 2021. As Head of Development at Intrinsic Value Films he oversaw 5lbs of Pressure for Lionsgate and Queen of the Ring for Sumerian. Oscar Gervet, an alumnus of Anonymous Content, XYZ Films and Entertainment 360, produces alongside Allen. Madrid-based Rei Pictures founders Benjamin Domenech and Santiago Gallelli, both Academy members, are Spain producing partners, with credits including Zama, Kill the Jockey, and Landmarks, all Venice premieres, and The Settlers at Cannes.
The Sandbox co-founders Arthur Madrid and Sébastien Borget are lead investors and partners. The pair co-founded Pixowl in 2011, a mobile studio built on licensed entertainment IP, before founding The Sandbox, which was named one of the TIME100 Most Influential Companies in 2022. HOLLYWOOD HILLS is their first feature film.
“Seb and I spent our careers building games on horror IPs that people already loved: Goosebumps, The Addams Family, The Walking Dead. Benjamin wrote about this city for twenty years before he wrote this script, and the first time we read it we knew the audience for it already existed. We just had to build them a bus,” said Madrid.
The film is financed in part through a public campaign on Republic. Full campaign terms, risk disclosures and offering documents are available at republic.com/hollywoodhills. This release is not an offer to sell securities. Any offer is made solely through Republic and the associated offering materials.
The film’s advisory board includes Sam Pressman, CEO of Pressman Film (American Psycho, The Crow), Thomas Vu, executive producer of Arcane and former Head of Creative at Riot Games, and filmmaker Nicolas Saada (Sleepless Night, Taj Mahal). Principal photography is scheduled for Q3 2027 in Spain. Release is targeted for 2028.
