Horror is the genre of fear; the genre of the body in danger. Of spaces that turn hostile while the ordinary world suddenly reveals itself to be something else entirely. It is the genre that understands, more than any other, that safety is an illusion. That the house can turn on you, that the people you trust can become unrecognizable, that the ground beneath your feet is never as solid as it looks.
Queer people have been living that plot for a long time.
For years people have claimed that all horror movies are metaphors. That the horror genre has spent decades externalizing fear. Giving it fangs, giving it a mask, giving it something you can point at and name. But the architecture of dread that horror builds so carefully onscreen is one that queer audiences have always recognized from somewhere closer to home. The locked door. The thing that follows you. The sense of being watched in a space that was supposed to be yours. These are not metaphors that require translation.
Queer horror as a genre has existed, but rarely centered. For every Bit there have been dozens of films that relegate queerness to the margins, to the character who dies first, to the subtext nobody onscreen will name. Fear Street gave us something rarer: a mainstream horror franchise that put queer love at the center of its survival narrative, not as tragedy bait but as the emotional engine driving the whole story. Bodies Bodies Bodies was sharper still, skewering the particular social horror of queer social spaces turned predatory, where the threat wasn’t supernatural at all but deeply, recognizably human.
What the queer horror film does, at its best, is collapse that distance. It refuses to let the supernatural do the heavy lifting alone. The monster and the social wound occupy the same frame, and the film does not let you look away from either. This is what separates the genre from mere representation. It is not enough to put a queer character in a horror film. Horror has to mean something about what it is to move through the world in a queer body.
Leviticus understands this completely.
First premiering at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival and being acquired by Neon soon after, Leviticus is the debut of Australian writer-director Adrian Chiarella. The film’s central plot can be pretty straight-forward, two teenage boys, Naim and Ryan, fall in love but are subjected to a ritual by the town’s religious community. This spawns the “main” villain, a monstrous entity that will hunt you down and take the form of the person you most desire. For our protagonists Naim and Ryan, that’s each other. But at its core, Leviticus is just a story of two boys that are just trying to find out who they are and where they fit in. This movie beautifully meshes the common horror aspects and the journey to self-discovery that is not only relevant to queer people, but anyone coming-of-age.
Not only does Leviticus do a great job depicting how lust and desire can feel like a monster within, but also how toxic religion and churches can hurt communities. Following a forced religious ritual, which is essentially a kind of conversion therapy, the violent supernatural entity starts chasing the boys. Through this movie, Chiarella shows how they can create harmful dynamics within the communities and result in more inner-community turmoil. People are constantly spying on their fellow goers, and if someone goes out of line they are quick to report that. This also exemplifies how the violence that queer people face in horror movies do often come from those that are supposed to be a support system or a protector, which adds to how isolating the queer experience can be. In the movie, Naim’s mom knowingly puts him through this supernatural conversion therapy, even though she knows the negative ramifications that will come of it. However, she is so blindsided by religion that she acts on her beliefs over the protection of her child.
Drawing on his own experience growing up as a gay man, Chiarella has been very vocal about why a movie like this is so important, especially in today’s political landscape. With this “return to conservatism” that we are seeing a lot in media and pop-culture, now is an important time for the queer horror genre and queer cinema as a whole to take center stage and help educate and push back against the hateful rhetoric that has become more mainstream in the past years.
I was lucky enough and got to attend an early screening SCAD and Neon held in Savannah back at the end of May. It really stuck with me and I loved it so much that as soon as tickets for Leviticus went on sale, I immediately bought one. After watching this movie two more times, I still find myself thinking about it and wanting to go watch it again. It feels like such a refreshing idea and one of those movies that you want to sit on after watching it. Like my favorite kinds of paintings, Chiarella took his time and made sure there was very close attention to detail, and the longer you spend thinking about the movie the more minute details you’ll realize.