Fear can take many forms. In the upcoming queer horror film Leviticus, it manifests as a shape-shifting entity that doubles as a metaphor.
“I’d wanted to merge my love of horror with homophobia because, if you think about it, horror movies are always about fear, and homophobia is a type of fear,” writer-director Adrian Chiarella tells EW, who shared four new images from the film.
The project was initially conceived as “The Exorcist, only it’s gay” before the first-time filmmaker went in a different direction, ultimately drawing inspiration from Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 sci-fi film Solaris.
What begins as a “slow-burn love story with just a sprinkling of horror,” as Chiarella describes, quickly accelerates. “I really felt we needed to see it erupt and explode and to remind the audience, ‘Don’t forget, this is a horror movie.'”
Joe Bird (Talk to Me) and Stacy Clausen play star-crossed teenage boys who must escape a violent entity that takes the form of the person they desire most — each other.
Chiarella directed the cast to “make the entity feel like a void,” Clausen shares. “When we were figuring out how it moves, there was a conversation about a predator. It kind of moves like a jaguar. It stalks. It doesn’t run. It never runs. It always is just there. It sneaks up, it gets close.”
Mia Wasikowska (Crimson Peak), Jeremy Blewitt, Ewen Leslie (The Nightingale), and Davida McKenzie (Silent Night) round out the cast.
“Leviticus is a strong debut with an incisive voice at the helm,” Meagan Navarro wrote in her review out of Sundance. “We care deeply about Naim and Ryan’s survival, making Leviticus a tense, atmospheric, and claustrophobic vision of young love in a hateful world.”
Leviticus opens in theaters on June 19 via Neon. It will screen at the Overlook Film Festival in New Orleans next week.
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