There is a particular logic to the monster at the centre of Leviticus, the Leviticus queer horror film that has been accumulating a devoted cult following since its Sundance premiere: it takes the shape of whoever you most desire, and only you can see it. The cruelty of that premise, and the strange tenderness it unlocks, is why audiences keep returning. Some, according to the film’s stars, have seen it more than twenty times.
Written and directed by Adrian Chiarella, Leviticus is set in a rural part of Melbourne and follows Naim (Joe Bird), a closeted, awkward teenager drawn to the outgoing Ryan (Stacy Clausen). Naim is also being raised by a religious, homophobic mother (Mia Waskikowsa) who takes him to church regularly, and the film earns its horror-movie mechanics by first establishing the world that makes them necessary. When Naim spots Ryan kissing the local pastor’s son, Hunter, he retaliates by reporting their sexuality to both sets of parents; the resulting gay exorcism, in which Ryan and Hunter convulse on the floor, arrives early enough to make clear that the supernatural threat arriving later is not the worst thing in this film’s universe.
The mechanics of the Leviticus queer horror film
The curse that eventually falls on Ryan operates with the internal consistency good genre filmmaking demands. The monster adopts the appearance of your number-one crush, it is invisible to everyone else, and the only practical defence is to spend all your time in proximity to the very person you are trying not to think about. As in It Follows, the creature functions as an unstoppable force, which gives the narrative momentum while keeping the metaphor clean. Teenage desire is not something you outwit by ignoring it.
‘It all came from my own dreams and nightmares of experiencing real-world homophobia as a teenager,’ Chiarella said in a London interview in early September. ‘Horror movies were so important to me. I’ve spoken to other LGBTQ+ people who also turned to horror movies for comfort.’ The genre, for Chiarella, is less escapism than a more honest register: it names things that social niceties require you to leave unnamed.
Bird, who is eighteen and previously co-starred as the younger brother in Talk to Me, describes his reaction to reading the script in straightforwardly personal terms. ‘I saw in the first five pages that they kiss. I was like: this is a queer story. It’s a beautiful film that’s needed in the world right now.’ His instinct about the audience has proved correct: since Sundance, the film has gathered a following that skews young and queer, and that returns repeatedly, drawn less by the jump scares than by the love story underneath them.
Romance, repetition, and Frank Ocean over the credits
The film’s most formally inventive quality is its treatment of the monster’s appearances as potential rom-com set-pieces. Once Naim receives the curse, every entrance Ryan makes carries a double valence: this could be an unstoppable supernatural entity, or it could be the teenage fantasy of a crush crawling through your window at night, asking to hide in your bed. When the monster, disguised as Ryan, kisses Naim slowly before the caressing hands move towards his neck, the horror and the desire become genuinely inseparable.
‘Me and Stacy had to work with an intimacy coordinator to figure out how the monster will latch onto desire,’ Bird explained. ‘It’s like a predator luring in its prey before it pounces.’ The choreography of that seduction is precise, and it is what makes the film’s central revelation land: when a character notes that the demon takes the form of whoever you most want, Naim and Ryan share a glance. Their feelings are confirmed not by a conversation or a declaration, but by the shared recognition that the thing trying to kill them is wearing each other’s face.
‘We’ve met people who’ve seen it 20 times,’ Chiarella said. ‘What brings them back is the love story.’ Bird added that someone in Sydney had seen it twenty-eight times. The fandom, then, is not responding primarily to the film’s horror mechanics, effective as they are; it is responding to a love story that uses those mechanics to say something about the specific terror of wanting someone when the world around you treats that want as a pathology.
The film also complicates the figure of the homophobic mother. Wasikowska’s Arlene is written, Chiarella said, as a three-dimensional grieving widow who sincerely believes that Naim is better off suffering the curse than living openly. ‘I wanted to show that it’ll take many years of healing for her to change her mind. You see films that engage with these themes, and the moment of redemption with the parents happens too quickly.’ The refusal of easy reconciliation is one of the film’s more quietly insistent choices.
Chiarella, whose background is half-Italian and half-Chinese, has spoken about why horror travels across cultural lines in a way that comedy does not always manage. ‘If I saw something frightening on the way home from school, it’d hook and terrify any member of my family, whether they’re from Malaysia, China, Italy, or Britain,’ he said. ‘It was instilled in me from a young age that horror movies will travel around the world.’
Bird, meanwhile, is angling for a different next step. ‘I’m begging him to do a comedy next,’ he said. Chiarella has not written a sequel to Leviticus, though he said he would not object if another filmmaker wanted to take one on. For now, the two are still in the promotional circuit: post-screening Q&As, which means standing in front of an audience while Frank Ocean’s ‘Self Control’ plays over the credits. ‘Me and Adrian have seen the last five minutes of the film about 60 times because of Q&As,’ Bird said. ‘I love “Self Control”, and it always makes me cry. I’m always about to go on stage, and I’m wiping away my tears.’ At Dazed, where this interview originally appeared, that detail about Olivia Rodrigo introducing Bird to The Cure also made it into print, which tells you something about the generational texture of a film that is, above all, about what it costs to want someone when wanting is forbidden. Leviticus is in UK cinemas now.
