Spoiler alert: This story contains spoilers for Leviticus, currently in theaters.
“I want it to be you” may be the most romantic conversation of the year.
Yes, this is from a horror movie, Leviticus by Adrian Chiarella, in which two gay teenagers are tormented by the person they most desire: violent supernatural beings who resemble each other.
“Leviticus,” which premiered to rave reviews at Sundance in January and was later acquired by Neon and released in theaters Friday, is named after a Bible verse that condemns homosexuality and is set in a conservative Australian town that condemns homosexuality.
The film follows Naim (Joe Bird) and Ryan (Stacey Clausen), who are attracted to each other and act on that attraction in the film’s opening scene. Due to the homophobic community, Naim agrees to keep it a secret, but later learns that Ryan is also involved with classmate Hunter (Jeremy Blewitt). Naim ends up revealing their secret to Hunter’s parents, who bring in a priest tasked with removing the boys’ “sins.” Shocked, Naim watches as Hunter and Ryan writhe on the floor in agony after being “cleansed,” but Ryan is frequently beaten throughout the film and becomes increasingly frightened of Naim.
Something was wrong, but Naim wasn’t sure what it was, even though he watched from inside the locked shop as Hunter was attacked and ultimately killed by an invisible presence. Eventually dragged to the same pastor by his mother (Mia Wasikowska), Naim finds solace at the funeral of a hunter he thought was Ryan, but then the monster begins attacking him. As the film progresses, the two desperately try to solve the mystery of their existence, unwilling to be separated from each other. After all, what could be a crueler (or sweeter) way to die than at the hands of a monster wearing the face of a loved one?
The audience never sees the monstrous version of Naim that Ryan fears, tearing his skin and bruising him, cementing Naim’s place as the storyteller.
“It would have been fun to see,” Bird told Variety. “But what attracted me to this role was that it was something I had never done before.” Bird’s breakout role came in the 2022 film Talk to Me, where he played a young boy possessed by demons and put his skills to the test in the role of Naim.
Clausen, on the other hand, said he had a lot of questions when he played the dual role of Ryan and a monster that looked just like him, starting with, “How on earth am I supposed to play this?”
A big part of figuring out how to play monsters was unpacking the entities themselves. “The main question I wanted to answer was, ‘What were you eating? What after?'” Clausen says. “Is it trying to scare them? Is it exploiting their reaction, or is it trying to get a reaction? What we found is that this monster is feeding on their desires and trying to elicit a real emotional response. Once it gets that response, it replaces it with fear.”
Conversations with Chiarella helped Clausen pinpoint the technical elements of the performance while practicing his insincere smile and vacant eyes. “We thought about how much we wanted to show in each scene,” Clausen says. “The more time you spend with that person, the better you become at imitation.” – Clausen agrees.
Naim first encountered the entity at Hunter’s funeral, and its true identity was revealed within seconds. By the time Naim approaches the house alone, he successfully persuades Naim into believing it is really Ryan, but as he approaches, he roughly grabs his head through the mesh gate. The dancing continues for much of the film, with Naim possessing the innocence of a teenage boy in love, wishing that the person in front of him is the real Ryan. That is until the two embark on a bloody chase through the woods and end up in an abandoned factory, where Naim discovers the entity’s only weakness: fire.
Naim sets the factory on fire and flees, but a monster resembling Ryan appears in the window and begs to be released, claiming to be human, but he stops for a moment. After thinking for a moment, Naim closed the bars to the monster’s screams and the audience’s relief.
“The paradox of the final act is that he doesn’t know if it’s the real Ryan or if it’s a trick,” Bird explains. “When the scene with[Ryan’s]search party happens, he ends up believing that he actually killed Ryan.”
Despite countless reasons why they should be apart, Ryan and Naim can’t help but be drawn to each other, not just out of love, but out of the understanding that they are the only gay men in their conservative community.
“This is a church town where they live, and the majority of the town is clearly opposed to homosexuality,” Byrd said. “Teenage romance is understandably intense, but it definitely increases the sense that this person is the only person I can be myself with in front of my family.”
“The biggest thing we wanted to portray is that these two boys really rely on each other. They’re the only people in the whole world who can share this little piece of truth and vulnerability,” Clausen added. “Yes, it’s a horror, but it’s really a coming-of-age story, and it’s first about the relationship between these two boys.”
One by one, the boys lose all potential allies. Hunter is killed by the entity, and his sister, who blamed Ryan for Hunter’s death, lures them into a trap where they are attacked by local boys, and Jessica (Shannon Berry), a fellow queer and “cleansed” teen, is in no condition to help them, and it is Naim’s mother Arlene who brought Naim to the pastor in the first place.
“When I first read the script, the line that stuck with me was Arlene’s line toward the end of the movie, where she says, ‘We need fear, Naim. We need it to survive,'” Byrd recalls. “I don’t think everyone believes that, I don’t, but it’s very interesting because all of these characters have had their own experiences that influence this way of thinking.”
The parents, perhaps the initial instigators of this film, are acting out of fear of their children’s sexuality. When Hunter’s parents call the pastor into town, a bloody and brutal chain of events begins. When Ryan learns that Naim told Hunter’s parents about them, he can’t forgive him.
“What I really liked about every character was that I could understand every decision that people make. With Arlene, even when she sends me off to a ritual, it’s from a place of love,” Bird said of coming to understand why Naim went to Hunter’s parents in the first place. “These boys are under the influence of hormones. They’re going through puberty, they can’t think straight, they’re not allowed to be who they are. It’s common for teenage boys to not express their feelings clearly and freely. They often express their emotions in a mixed way.”
Ryan and Naim’s strong on-screen bond is partly due to the actors forming a genuine friendship before production began. “Adrian really brought us together from the beginning,” Clausen says. What did they do to kill time? He plays games when he is alone and escapes from the room when Chiarella orders him to do so. “At the time, I thought, ‘Oh, this is just fun for us to do,’ and then I realized it was because he wanted us to be scared of each other. Emotions are so important in this movie, so even though we were vulnerable with each other when filming, that trust was already there.”
The pre-production stage wasn’t all puzzles and adrenaline. Chiarella, who openly shared his gay experiences that helped shape the story of Leviticus, took Bird and Clausen to Geelong, a small town in the Australian state of Victoria. Geelong is about the same size as the town in which the movie is set.
“Just spending time in that environment and walking through it was like being present in the literal environment that these boys live and spend their lives in,” Clausen said, adding that it helped frame his and Byrd’s perspective on how their characters would develop.
In another pre-production exercise, Chiarella assigned two monologues from a conversion therapy documentary. “This really helped me understand the specific context of what the boys were going through, because I’m not familiar with that world myself,” Clausen says. But conversion therapy is not an entirely foreign topic for the two of them. “If you’re a generation that grew up online, you’re exposed to this kind of information pretty quickly, and it’s prevalent in the news,” Bird says. “I hope this movie makes people more aware of that because it’s still happening.”
The film’s unique and visceral take on the issue was one of the reasons Bird was drawn to the project when he was still in Year 12 at Adelaide High School. “This was one of the most raw, authentic, honest scripts I’ve ever read,” Bird says. I remember thinking, “I have to be a part of this.”
Clausen joked that he must have wanted Bird first since he had received the script earlier, and auditioned for Ryan, Naim, and Hunter, earning callbacks for all three. “At first it was like any other project, just a tiny little Australian indie film being shot in my hometown. It wasn’t supposed to be like this…” Clausen trailed off, gesturing with his hands at the intensity of the enthusiasm surrounding the film.
Anticipation for the film has been building in recent months among horror fans and fans of queer media. Despite the buzz, Clausen and Bird remain healthy skeptics about whether the film will catapult them to overnight fame.
“It’s a foreign concept. We’ve lived in Australian cities all our lives and artists don’t go on tour,” says Clausen. “But I guess you can see what happens. I’m nervous but excited. Just go for a run. ”
Although the publicity was a little scary for Bird, the two loved watching the edits come in, especially since Chiarella posted scene packs on social media ahead of the film’s release. “A lot of heartwarming things happened. People come up after the screening and say they wish they had seen this movie when they were younger or when they were older,” Bird says. “That’s all we can hope for.”
There was a small discussion online (and plenty of Letterboxd reviews) comparing “Leviticus” to other popular gay media outlets, namely the hit hockey series “Heated Rivalry.”
“Obviously these are two very different mediums that are trying to say two different things, but I think they both showcase queer characters on screen,” Bird says of the different projects being grouped together by their nature. “If you’re going to compare queer media to other queer media, I think they should be grouped together because it’s a genre and I want more of it to be filled.”
Horror, Leviticus’ all-genre label, is also having a busy summer with director Kane Parson’s “Backrooms” and “Obsession,” which set an unprecedented box office success within the genre.
“We feel really, really lucky that these two movies hit right before ours came out,” says Bird, who is “honored” to have Leviticus in the lineup. “My favorite thing about it is that it’s an independent film that’s doing crazy things in the horror genre, and that Gen Z is going to the theaters, which is amazing to hear,” Clausen added.
As a horror film, Leviticus’ ending is all the more poignant.
Worried that Ryan is dead, Naim abandons his mother and flees to the bus stop to leave town. That’s where I met Ryan. Ryan looks exhausted and battered and clearly has the same plan. The two leave together and discover the monster in the field when Naim begins dozing on Ryan’s shoulder. This is by no means a sudden scare, but a free-spirited reminder that the story isn’t over yet, to the tune of Frank Ocean’s “Self Control.”
People always die in horror movies. Homosexuals die in the media all the time, hence the phrase “bury your gays.” It wouldn’t have been far off for one (or both) of Ryan and Naim to succumb to the monster, but it was important to Chiarella and the actors that the pair didn’t suffer the same fate as many of their characters before them.
“There was nothing in the early drafts of the script that didn’t have a happy ending,” Clausen says. (For the record: Clausen and Bird like to think that their characters left Australia, perhaps immigrated to France, got married and had children).
“There’s a question: The monster is still out there, and that fear is always with them,” Byrd continues. “But they are choosing to stay together. To keep each other hopeful for as long as they can.”
