‘Did homophobia become OK again?’ Backlash inspires breakthrough horror film

As a gay man, writer-director Adrian Chiarella appreciated how much progress Australia had made leading up to the legalisation of same-sex marriage in 2017. It meant he could marry his partner, writer-producer Michael Lucas, who created The Newsreader and co-created Five Bedrooms.

But then Chiarella, 45, started to notice a subtle change in the nation’s temperature.

“I noticed things starting to regress,” he says. “I noticed little microaggressions of homophobia in day-to-day life. And then I noticed that there was a lot of rhetoric in public space and political talk. I thought, ‘did homophobia become OK again? When did all this become acceptable?’.”

An idea took hold that has turned into the horror film Leviticus, which made such a splash at the Sundance Film Festival this year that worldwide rights were snapped up by American indie distributor Neon, of Parasite, Anora and The Secret Agent fame.

It centres on 17-year-old Naim (Joe Bird from Talk To Me) whose life in a drab, religious, industrial town brightens when he kisses schoolmate Ryan (Stacy Clausen from Scrublands) in an abandoned mill. But their budding romance becomes complicated when a “deliverance preacher” (Nicholas Hope) is summoned to “cure” same-sex attracted teenagers.

A violent entity emerges that takes the form of the person Naim and Ryan most desire – each other.

It’s a beautifully shot, impressively acted film that was shot around Victoria, including Geelong and suburban Melbourne. The entity is a metaphor for the traumas of gay conversion in a town where homophobia and fear of difference thrives, even among apparently caring parents (Mia Wasikowska and Ewen Leslie).

Since Jennifer Kent’s groundbreaking The Babadook in 2014, elevated horror, which addresses social issues rather than just trying to freak out audiences, has worked well for debut Australian directors. Leading the way have been Danny and Michael Philippou (with Talk To Me in 2023 and last year’s Bring Her Back) and Michael Shanks (last year’s Together).

Chiarella saw it as an ideal genre to explore homophobia, developing the script with Samantha Jennings and Kristina Ceyton at Causeway Films, the production company behind The Babadook, Talk To Me, Of An Age (2023), The Moogai (2024) and Bring Her Back.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re making a slasher movie or a psychological horror or a supernatural horror, they’re always about fear,” he says. “At some point you understand what it is that the main character is really scared of. I thought, well, homophobia is a type of fear. I played around with that idea for a long time: how can I make a horror movie about homophobia?”

Chiarella had read about exorcisms performed on LGBTQ teenagers in different cultures.

“I thought, ‘maybe we’ll do something like The Exorcist, but with a queer theme to it’,” he says. “But every variation I came up with just seemed to justify this belief that there was some sort of gay demon …

“So I thought, ‘what’s the opposite of that?’ Then I started to come up with this idea of ‘what if there’s a horror monster, but it takes the form of the person you’re most attracted to?’ Once I had that, I was able to dig into the other half of the film that I was really excited about, which was telling a love story.”

Chiarella brings a rich cultural experience to his filmmaking career.

“My dad’s Italian, my mother’s Chinese,” he says. “My mum, even though she wasn’t in the world of filmmaking, introduced me to film because she used to watch a lot of Chinese cinema in the ’90s.”

Chiarella’s mother – she was a business analyst, his dad was a mathematically minded academic – would rent poor quality, probably bootleg VHS tapes from a store next to a Chinese grocery. While he lives in Melbourne now, he grew up in Greenwich on Sydney’s lower north shore.

“Because there were no subtitles – and I’m such a terrible second-generation immigrant, I didn’t ever learn Chinese – I had no idea what people were saying,” he says. “But I just loved the imagery.

“It wasn’t till I grew up that I realised those films that she was watching were by filmmakers like Wong Kar-wai and Hou Hsiao-hsien and Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige. I realised that I was absorbing a lot of what the potential of cinema can be just in the kind of sounds and images that are created.”

Chiarella has been building towards his debut feature since he learnt what a script was during work experience “as a nervous little teenager” on the fondly remembered ABC drama GP. Having learnt some editing skills volunteering in post-production houses on a UK trip, he spent two years among the bright young things at Darlinghurst’s grand Italianate manor Iona as Baz Lurhmann made Australia (2008) – his “first proper job” in the industry.

Chiarella went on to study editing at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School then started directing shorts and episodes of Totally Completely Fine (2023) and Five Bedrooms (2023).

Bird, 19, says that when he first read the script, he thought Leviticus was more than just a horror film.

At the end of the day, the message of it is that [homophobia] can kill.

Joe Bird

“You have that romance part of the film, the coming-of-age part of the film, the dramatic side, then you have the horror,” he says. “What’s so great about this script is that there are so many different things you can take from it. But at the end of the day, the message of it is that [homophobia] can kill.”

Chiarella had intriguing ways of getting his two lead actors to bond during pre-production.

“He took me and Stacey on the drive down to Geelong, where we filmed the majority of the film,” Bird says. “He just dropped us in two separate areas and said ‘turn your locations on to each other [on their phones] and try to find each other’.

“Adrian also sent us to an escape room so that we could be around each other in a fearful state of mind. We just did a bunch of activities in pre-production. Being forced to be with each other like that, you build a bond.”

In June, Leviticus is the sole Australian selection in the $60,000 competition for “audacious, cutting-edge and courageous” cinema at Sydney Film Festival.

“Some of my absolute filmmaking heroes are in that competition, people like Hirokazu Kore-eda and Cristian Mungiu,” Chiarella says. “It’s incredible to be screening a film next to them – a real dream come true.”

Leviticus screens in competition at Sydney Film Festival, and in general release from June 18. The competition includes the films that dominated the awards at this month’s Cannes Film Festival: Mungiu’s Palme d’Or winning Norwegian drama Fjord, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Grand Prix-winning thriller Minotaur , Paweł Pawlikowski’s Thomas Mann drama Fatherland, which shared best director, and Marie-Clémentine Dusabejambo’s Rwandan reconciliation drama Ben’Imana, which won the Caméra d’Or for best first feature film.

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