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June is Pride Month, and there are plenty of folks seeking out LGBTQ+ stories to experience as a result. While we were treated to RuPaul's new comedy Stop! That! Train!, there's an upcoming horror movie with queer themes coming out as well: Adrian Chiarella's Leviticus. The movie follows two young gay teenagers who are tormented by a supernatural entity that takes the form of the person they're most attracted to. I thought the movie was an allegory about the dangers of conversion therapy, but the filmmaker offered me another POV.
While it remains to be seen if Leviticus ends up becoming one of the best horror movies of the year, I personally loved the new Australian scary movie. As you can see in the video above, I got the chance to speak with actor Joe Bird (who starred in Talk To Me) and director Adrian Chiarella ahead of the movie's release. The filmmaker spoke more about wanting to explore homophobia via horror, telling me:
I think with everything we're going through right now, I wanted to make a movie about homophobia. But I mean, not just conversion therapy, homophobia in all its shades, internalized, externalized. Or maybe it comes veiled in a form a little bit like what Mia's character's presenting, where it seems like it's it coming from a place of protection. Like all of that was what I wanted to encapsulate in the film.
Actress Mia Wasikowska plays the mother of Joe Bird's protagonist Naim, who has a "Deliverance Healer" try and cure her son's homosexuality. While she means well, this ceremony is what summons the entity that haunts the boys throughout Leviticus' 88-minute runtime. She thinks she's helping her son, which is yet another way that homophobia can sometimes manifest itself out in the real world.
Over the past few years there's been a ton of discourse about the importance of LGBTQ+ representation in movies, and Leviticus pivots between showing young queer love and having its heroes stalked by a presence that looks like the person they're attracted to. Later in our conversation, Chiarella spoke more about this new type of horror villain, telling me:
And I think I knew I had a horror movie when I came up with this sort of, this horror monster, this entity that takes the form of the person you're most attracted to. The fact that it was this metaphor for scaring people out of their desires, which I think is something that is experienced by a lot of teenagers in a lot of different cultures, through a lot of different practices and little microaggressions and behavior.
Same-sex attraction can often inspire homophobia, whether its in microaggressions or more insidious things like conversion therapy. In that way Leviticus tells a story that's universal, while bringing a wholly originally horror movie to theaters. Both Obsession and Backrooms have been crushing at the box office this summer, but Adrian Chiarella's new movie is the perfect Pride scary movie for queer fans of the genre (of which there are many).
Leviticus hits theaters on July 19th as part of the 2026 movie release list. We'll just have to see if this becomes another instant horror classic. Personally I loved what Adrian Chiarella brought to the table, and found its story moving as a queer person myself.
