Leviticus Share on Facebook Share on X Google Preferred Share to Flipboard Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Send an Email Print the Article Post a Comment Some years ago, Adrian Chiarella started hearing wild tales of exorcisms performed on queer teenagers from all over the world. One close friend told the Australia native about being taken to a Taoist priest who "mimed cutting the queerness off him with a knife." Chiarella hadn't experienced anything quite like that, but as a young gay man, he grew up deeply afraid of forces that were hard to place - and thus felt a draw to these horrific stories. "I wanted to interrogate where that fear comes from and why it affects us so deeply," he says. "It felt right for a horror movie." Enter Leviticus, Chiarella's debut feature, premiering Jan. 23 in Sundance's Midnight section. The film follows Naim (Talk to Me's Joe Bird), a quiet teenager who moves with his single mother (Mia Wasikowska) to a remote Australian town defined by its fanatical religious community. After his brief, sweet romance with schoolmate Ryan (Stacy Clausen) gets exposed, Naim is subjected to a most extreme version of conversion therapy that leaves him haunted, literally - by an entity taking the form of the very person with whom he's falling in love. Related Stories Movies 'Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty!' Review: A Japanese Widow Dances Her Way Back to Life in a Lovely Comic Drama Movies 'The Incomer' Review: Domhnall Gleeson Gets Hurled Onto a Rocky Shore and Pelted With a Deluge of Aggressively Quaint Quirk Joe Bird appears in 'Leviticus' by Adrian Chiarella Ben Saunders/Courtesy of Sundance The mechanics of this brutal twist speak starkly to the effects of conversion therapy, from physicalized terror to self-loathing. Chiarella spoke extensively to those with firsthand experience. "As I got deeper and deeper into figuring out, 'How do I turn this into a horror movie without making it feel like the queerness is the monster?' - which is an easy trap to fall into - I asked myself, 'What am I actually trying to say here?' " the director says. "A horror movie needs to have some sort of monster in it. That's the archetype. Eventually I landed on this idea that the monster is this thing that takes the form of the person you're most attracted to." But Chiarella, who got his start as an editor working under Baz Luhrmann and other noted filmmakers before pivoting to directing shorts a decade ago, was careful not to take any shortcuts in fashioning a rigorous (if still plenty terrifying) exploration of sexuality and homophobia. "We've seen a lot of horror movies about trauma in the last decade or so, but I don't know that anyone's really explored this kind of trauma in this genre," he says. "The core of most great horror movies is not, 'I might get scared,' but the sense that I'm hurting the person I love. ... I always wanted this to be about two teenagers in love, wrapped around that idea." Below, about a week out from Sundance, Chiarella explains how he pulled that off - with some jumpscares to boot. Chiarella (right) on the set of 'Leviticus' Are you ready for Sundance? Where are you in the process? I'm sitting in a sound studio in Melbourne, putting the last finishing touches on everything. It's going to be a real race to the finish, but worth it. I'm very excited for Sundance. As long as I've been interested in filmmaking, I've known about Sundance. It's got that status amongst all filmmakers and I know how special this one is going to be. Given the origins of this project, and the very real issues it contends with, can you talk about why you made it a horror movie? It's pretty terrifying to watch at times. As I started writing more and more, bringing into my own experiences as a gay man, I thought about the fact that sometimes when we're young and we're discovering these new feelings, that can be a bit scary. I've always been interested in horror. My interest in horror comes from the fact that I have this quite multicultural family: I have a Chinese mother and an Italian father, and I think when I was a young kid trying to tell stories to my extended family, I just knew that certain stories would translate better than others. If I tried to tell a funny joke to my mom's side of the family, the joke might not land on my dad's side of the family - but scary stories always worked. If I talked about being scared that someone was maybe following me in the street, I always knew I'd have the listener in the palm of my hand. I knew from a young age that horror movies, scary stories, are really universal. How did it all come together where you had the resources to make this? I started out as an editor...and worked on little short films in my spare time. I was learning from emerging directors who were making their first films and learning from their early mistakes, trying things out and being very experimental with their work. Whe