After ‘Backrooms’ and ‘Obsession,’ the Summer’s Next Big Horror Movie Deserves to Be ‘Leviticus’

Writer/director Adrian Chiarella talks to IndieWire about releasing "Leviticus" in a watershed moment for horror, the wild Sundance reception, and putting out a queer horror romance in 1,000-plus theaters amid a fractured moment for the LGBTQ community.

The summer movie season — hell, the movie industry — is in its horror era.

The box-office-sensational double bill of “Backrooms” and “Obsession” has dominated theater-going discourse all season, and it’s not even officially summer yet, but pricey tentpoles like “Mandalorian vs. Grogu” and “Masters of the Universe” are already fading from view — and ticket sale charts.

Up next in fright-filled movie summer that includes new “Evil Dead” and “Resident Evil” entries is a Sundance darling with few quote-unquote recognizable movie stars and no I.P. ties to speak of: writer/director Adrian Chiarella’s conversation-therapy-as-waking-nightmare horror “Leviticus.”

Neon plunked down a figure in the reported seven-figure range out of the festival’s final Park City edition for its splashiest sale behind A24’s pickup of Olivia Wilde’s “The Invite.” Praised by IndieWire as “It Follows” meets “Heated Rivalry,” “Leviticus” is not exactly that, but this horror-romance about teenage boys who are stalked by the supernatural doppelgangers of each other that only they can see is about invisible entities, furtive queer desire, and sexual repression.

Australian filmmaker Chiarella, who previously directed three shorts that premiered in his home country as well as episodes of psychosexual television series, understands the significance of releasing his film right now — in both Australia and the United States.

“They’re very tough acts to follow,” he told IndieWire when asked about parallels to “Backrooms” and “Obsession.” “I love both of those movies. They have a very specific perspective on relationships. I think ‘Leviticus’ has a slightly different take on relationships at the end [laughs]. … I went to see ‘Backrooms’ and the crowd was full of really young people of a generation I’ve never seen turn out for the cinema like that before. They did play the trailer for ‘Leviticus,’ and as much as they were a rowdy crowd, they went very, very quiet for a film, which was kind of nice. I was a bit nervous. I thought, ‘Is some young boy going to yell out something really homophobic during our trailer?’ But they were actually really engaged, which was encouraging.”

In “Leviticus,” Naim (Joe Bird, breakout young star of A24’s Sundance horror smash “Talk to Me”) and his mother (Mia Wasikowska, in a rare return to the screen after leaving Hollywood to return to Australia years ago) recently moved to a small town with heavy religious overtures — and a pastor with a very unholy method of purifying the village’s sexually repressed young men. Naim and Ryan (newcomer Stacy Clausen) are attracted to each other, but both are subjected to a conversion therapy process that finds each of them murderously haunted by the other’s ghostly double. One that looks, talks, and, yes, touches just like the real version.

In other words, this demonic presence takes the form of the person you desire the most. In this case, it’s each other.

“My parents are not religious, but I went to a religious school, and having Leviticus quoted at you [from the Bible] is something that I did have to endure, and experiencing homophobia, both from other young people around me, as well as kind of institutionalized versions of it, where you’re actually hearing teachers and people who, were running the school … spout all of this kind of language in assemblies and in classrooms, so you felt like it was coming at you from all angles,” Chiarella said. “I did hear stories about people going through not just conversion therapy but all forms of weird, coercive behavior that their teachers put them through. The film is really inspired by not just by own experiences, but by my community as well.”

“Leviticus” will open on June 19 in 1,000+ plus theaters around the United States, in tandem with its Australian release. Chiarella knows that, unlike “Obsession” and “Backrooms,” “Leviticus” faces the unique uphill challenge of being a queer movie that’s entering national theaters.

“I’ve noticed around the world, and part of the reason I made this film, this regression we’ve had in LGTBQ rights in the last decade or so,” said Chiarella, who came out as a teen in Australia and married his husband after same-sex marriage became legal there in 2017. “It makes me a little anxious about releasing a film like this, but at the same time, but it makes me excited because I feel like we need more of these kinds of stories. It’s been a while since I’ve seen an Australian film with a queer love story at its heart open this wide in my own country.”

He added it’s a film where “you want people to come to rather than force it upon them, in a way.”

Also particular to “Leviticus” is that it doubles as an aching, young-adult love story infused with as much yearning as it is horror, violence, and otherworldly terror.

“Our producer, Sam Jennings, a middle-aged lady, is the target audience for ‘Heated Rivalry,’ and when we were in post, she was always coming in and talking about ‘Heated Rivalry’ and how much she loved it,” Chiarella said. “I still remember when we screened the film at Sundance, it got this really amazing response that I wasn’t expecting. We were leaving the Ray Theatre, it’s just the experience of this wall of noise, everyone trying to talk to me, and telling me what they thought of the film. It was all this garbled wall of sound to me, and I just heard this one voice rising above it, which was Sam Jennings yelling, ‘Heated Rivalry’ meets ‘It Follows,’ and she was waving her phone! It was kind of amazing.”

That said, “not every gay love story has to be ‘Heated Rivalry’ and be compared to that. This is a very, very different story than what those two characters in that TV series are going through. It’s set in a very different world, obviously, but I think their experience of intimacy and sexuality is represented in a slightly different way to the one that the TV series does [laughs]. … We all enjoy the way ‘Heated Rivalry’ represents intimacy. It’s very elevated … with our film, I said to the intimacy coordinator and the actors, I wanted them to lean into the true awkwardness, of when you’re first exploring your body when you’re with someone else.”

Chiarella’s fixation with horror — which has its own tradition in Australia, from the brutal Outback thriller “Wake in Fright” to slasher “Wolf Creek” and motherhood nightmare “The Babadook” — began with the American classics, which “Leviticus” also affectionately references.

“When I was a kid, I used to watch ‘Nightmare on Elm Street,’ even though my parents wouldn’t really let me, and I think I found there was something incredibly unsettling about invading someone’s dreams, because I felt like even as a young kid, I might have been about six or seven years old, I knew that dreams were one of the only safe places you could go to,” Chiarella said.

“To have a horror movie that was about your dream — you’re not even safe in your dreams anymore. That really freaked me out, but at the same time I was like, ‘Why am I so obsessed with these movies that give me such an anxious feeling?’ I kept going back to watch more and more of them, and I think maybe part of that is why in ‘Leviticus’ we have this element of the lore, where the monster only gets you when you’re alone,” he said. “I think if you’re a young queer teenager, you feel like being on your own is sometimes the only safe place you can be with your thoughts and your feelings.”

“Leviticus” filmed for 30 days in Victoria, Australia. Chiarella isn’t able to share the film’s budget, though it was enough to secure a Frank Ocean song I won’t spoil at an especially tender but emotionally wounding moment. (“Frank approved it” and “gave everyone a really good deal.”)

Chiarella secured backing from production company Causeway Films, which also handled “Talk to Me” ($91 million worldwide) and “The Babadook” ($10 million worldwide, but now a hugely adored cult classic), and helped raise additional financing for “Leviticus.” The film also embraces both “the really fun part of old-fashioned practical effects” and the abilities of post-production to tidy up in-camera moments, such as rigging when characters are seen hurled or dragged across a room by an invisible force.

“When I wrote the script, it was in a program here in Australia. We have a lot of state and federally funded programs here for our filmmakers … it was going to get made for a very, very low, a little bit better than microbudget,” Chiarella said. Causeway “read the script. Part of the reason they came on board is they said, ‘We think this is worthy of a bigger budget, not just because it’s a horror movie. You might want to do specky things with effects, but they said you clearly want to use a young cast, and it’s really important not to be too rushed when you do that.’ They came on board and helped get the budget up a little more so we could shoot over 30 days and weren’t scrambling.”

Chiarella is aware of how the majority of first-time feature filmmakers nowadays are cutting their teeth in horror movies — including Curry Barker and Kane Parsons. But we do need other stories, and Chiarella said he’s “working on a few projects” he wants to write himself.

“I feel like every time I go to LA, every spare minute that I have, my agents are trying to get me in front of another producer, and then that usually leads to some conversation about projects that they have on their slate, and we talk a little bit about that,” he said. “So I’m kind of completely open to what the next phase is, and I’m also learning a lot from this film about what audiences responded to, and about what really worked and what didn’t, because this all happened very quickly. We got into Sundance before we’d finished the film, and then we sold the film before we left. I’m kind of also trying to take a moment to see this film for what it really is in front of an audience.”

“Leviticus” opens from Neon on Friday, June 19.