Following its success at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Leviticus, the debut feature from Australian director Adrian Chiarella, has been dubbed the Heated Rivalry of horror. And Chiarella and his stars have graciously accepted the nickname — thanks, we assume, to Aussies’ characteristically good sense of humor.
But Leviticus, named for the Old Testament chapter often cited as justification for anti-LGBTQ laws and religious beliefs, is no laughing matter. The horror-romance, starring Talk to Me’s Joe Bird and up-and-comer Stacy Clausen, centers on young love that blooms in a hostile, small-town atmosphere, leading to horrific consequences.
The trailer for the film, which has been circulating online since its Wednesday release, shows Naim (Bird), being stalked by a scary approximation of his new high school crush, Ryan (Clausen). As if being the new kid weren’t already enough, it turns out that the small town that Naim’s mother (Mia Wasikowska) has moved him to houses a pastor hellbent on ridding its boys of homosexual urges. And an exorcism-gone-bad ends up saddling the young lovers with demonic stalkers who appear in the form of the person they desire most — each other.
The teenage-sex-has-consequences scenario has earned the film comparisons to indie horror hit It Follows. But it’s also part of a rich tradition of genre films that give voice to queer dread while delivering bone-chilling thrills.
“There’s this kind of secret history with horror films, isn’t there? That we’ve had great artists like Mary Shelley and James Whale and Murnau and Clive Barker and these queer artists that have really shaped horror into what it is now — sometimes, because they were operating in a taboo field when they were dealing with themes they wanted to address, sometimes not,” Chiarella said after a recent screening of the film at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art’s New Directors/New Films festival. “And I think what we did with this film was try to reclaim a little bit of that space back by making a queer horror movie.”
He added, “I think horror films are also just really fun, because they’re very visceral. They get to you through your body.”
Leviticus, which marks Wasikowska’s long-awaited return to the limelight, is being released by Neon in theaters June 19. Watch the trailer for the buzzy new horror flick below.
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