“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.”
