“Leviticus” was born from a place of anxiety. It’s perhaps a bit obvious, given the premise.
In the film that opens in theaters Friday, the first feature-length project from writer-director Adrian Chiarella, two teen boys in Australia fall in love, but after a dark, religious conversion therapy, they’re pursued by demonic forces that look like the thing they desire the most: each other.
“I’d noticed there was this shift in the air in the last five or 10 years, at least in Australia, of a regression of a lot of the rights LGBTQIA+ people had fought so hard for,” Chiarella says. “Particularly in the language we were hearing in our political sphere, and also microaggressions in day-to-day life. I wanted to make a film about that, but I didn’t want to go backwards as a filmmaker. I wanted to do something a little bit newer and a bit more personal. So I thought about the kinds of films that I watched at that time in my life when I was going through experiences similar to the ones in this film. They were horror movies, basically. And I think, like a lot of young queer people, I turned to that genre because of the way it explored otherness and that destabilizing feeling some of us have on our journey to self-discovery. So I brought the two things together, and I realized, ‘Horror is the genre of fear.’ It’s where we ask the audience, ‘What are you really scared of?’ And that felt like the right space to explore homophobia in all its different shades.”
Despite the dread infusing the movie, Chiarella is able to conjure plenty of passion between his lead characters, Naim (Joe Bird) and Ryan (Stacy Clausen). He says it’s a result of being flexible in fine-tuning how much he hopes to turn up the romance and scares in each scene.
“It was being tuned all the way through, from the scripting stage right through to the rehearsal, with the actors and figuring out how we’re going to convey this love story between the two of them, but also how do we convey this monster,” Chiarella says. “To be honest, it’s something we worked on right until the very end of post when we delivered the film. I think we were maybe only a week out from premiering the film at Sundance, and I went back into the edit just to change a few things because it wasn’t quite sitting right, and it had been bugging me for so long. I wanted the audience to stay in that guessing game all the way through. We were always checking in with each other: Is this too scary? Is this tender enough? Also, this movie doesn’t work without the chemistry between Joe and Stacy. The love story isn’t going to work, but also the whole mechanism of that entity, that horror monster, doesn’t actually work unless you really, really believe that these two young guys are attracted to each other.”
Chiarella felt the onscreen passion between Bird and Clausen early on, when the pair was just submitting self-tapes. But after some workshopping with potential actors in callbacks, it was clear to Chiarella that they were the pair to tell his story. From there, he inspired the duo to keep fostering their bond.
“Once I cast them, I just encouraged them to hang out a lot together,” Chiarella says. “They became friends right off the back of that casting session. They stayed in touch, and even though they live in different states, they kept messaging each other and calling each other. When we started rehearsals, I remember I took them on a road trip around a lot of the locations we were going to shoot in, just for them to get used to the spaces, but also for them to get used to being around each other. I did lots of fun stuff with them. I dropped them in different parts of one of the towns we shot in and got them to find each other. I sent them to a crowded shopping mall in character so they could feel what it would be like to be these characters in public and what it’s like to be around other people, and what it’s like to have that connection with each other but not be able to show it in public. I sent them out to do a lot of things on their own. They did escape rooms. Because of that scene with the snake at the start, I got them to hold a snake. I got them to do a lot of different exercises that really just got them comfortable with each other, and made the actual job of having to act in this film not feel like they were having to put on some big show for everybody. It was just something that was happening in front of the camera.”
The chemistry has been convincing to audiences and turned “Leviticus” into one of the year’s buzziest horror movies months before its release. After debuting at this year’s Sundance, Neon acquired the film in a seven-figure deal and gave it a prime summer theatrical date. While hype has built at other festival stops like South by Southwest and the Overlook Film Festival, Chiarella didn’t predict that his movie would open in the wake of two improbable box office titans — “Backrooms” and “Obsession” — that proved audiences were thirsty for unique, auteur-driven horror filmmaking.
“It’s a really, really exciting time,” Chiarella says. “I think those two horror movies are incredible. I loved both of them. They’re very tough acts to follow. I think the reason horror is having this resurgence is that people want to feel something again at the movies. The one thing that you can guarantee is that a horror movie is going to make you feel something. You might not like the feeling, not everyone does, but you know for sure you’re not just going to be sitting there and passively experiencing this thing in front of you, right? You’re going to get a shock that’s going to enter you through your body. I also think horror is a really great genre for first-time directors. It’s very expressive. It allows you to really stretch your voice and see what it is that you can say, but also how you say it. It also doesn’t require big stars and big-name actors. You can let the concept speak for itself. The fact that this genre is really taking off again, I think, means we’ll see so many other more exciting new voices come out of the cinema in the next few years.”
As for his own voice, Chiarella is hesitant to make any promises when asked if we would ever see another film set in this world or revisit Naim and Ryan in some capacity.
“I wish I could give you a firm answer, but I’m not going to,” he says. “But what I will say is I know people really love these two characters, so there’s something rich there. But on the flip side of that, this horror movie monster we came up with, this lore, the experience of people in the LGBTQIA+ community is very wide, and there are a lot of different things people have gone through. It might be the kind of territory that we can start speaking to other experiences through as well.”
As for Chiarella’s next move? A focus on relationship-driven storytelling.
“I always want to explore personal stories, very grounded relationships,” he says. “I want to work with actors to try and achieve something that feels very real, like you’re just observing life. We had this saying when we were making this film, all through the shoot and through the edit. If something wasn’t working, we’d say, ‘It just feels like a movie.’ We don’t want that. We want it to feel like life. Just because it’s a horror movie and we have this one thing in it, which is this supernatural entity, doesn’t mean the whole thing has to be all heightened and unbelievable. I would love to do that with other genres.”
Watch the trailer for “Leviticus” below.
