A horror film’s on-again, off-again journey to a release date is on again, but its young makers are wiser to the process.

Just hours after All the Boys Love Mandy Lane had its debut screening at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, the movie’s makers were sitting on top of the independent film mountain. In an all-night negotiating session following Mandy Lane’s first showing, Harvey Weinstein purchased the low-budget teen thriller for $3.5 million, promising to release it on at least 800 screens.

But like the underage victims in the film, Mandy Lane immediately went missing.

Nearly a year after its Toronto debut, the movie hasn’t reached theaters. But what would have been essentially a direct-to-video release was averted at the last minute, and the film now is scheduled to arrive at the multiplex in early 2008. Though it won the brief but spirited bidding war, the Weinstein Co. no longer owns the film’s U.S. rights, having sold them to a new German-backed distribution company.

The rise, fall and potential resurrection of Mandy Lane offers a primer on the wild swings of independent filmmaking, in which you can be a film festival favorite one day, the victim of a poor test screening the next, and then wake up in the hands of a new, untested distributor.

The horror feature All the Boys Love Mandy Lane has found a new distribution home.

Senator Entertainment’s U.S. arm has picked up the North American distribution rights to the Occupant Films production from the Weinstein Co. The movie will be the first theatrical release for the German-based company.

The Weinstein Co. picked up worldwide rights to the movie at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival. The movie was scheduled for a July 20 release, but in recent weeks, there were no trailers, posters or other marketing, and it was clear the studio was dumping it.

Directed by Jonathan Levine and written by Jacob Forman, Mandy Lane stars Amber Heard as an idolized high school student who accompanies five friends on a weekend trip to a ranch, where each is eliminated by a mysterious killer.