How the Leviticus Team Crafted One of This Year’s Best, Most Haunting Queer Love Stories
Without a doubt, NEON’s Leviticus was one of this year’s most original and most memorable queer love stories to date.
Equal parts coming-of-age, romantic drama, and supernatural horror, the film (written and directed by Adrian Chiarella) tells the story of a high schooler named Naim (Joe Bird) who, alongside his incredibly religious mother, moves to a conservative, evangelical Christian town where he meets and falls in love with his schoolmate Ryan (Stacy Clausen).
Though Naim and Ryan have a mutual attraction to each other and start a cute, loving fling, after witnessing Ryan getting intimate with another one of their schoolmates, Naim gets jealous and outs Ryan to his parents, which leads to a terrifying gay exorcism being performed on him by a “deliverance healer” in front of multiple members of their anti-gay church community.
After Naim’s sexuality and his relationship with Ryan also gets disclosed to Naim’s mother, he is also subjected to the exorcism ceremony, and the two soon find out that because of the ceremony, a mysterious, supernatural, and extremely violent being is out to get them both. A being that takes the form of the ones they love the most: each other. (If you were a fan of 2014’s It Follows and wanted it to be gay AF, this one’s for you!)
Earlier this summer, Episode Ever After got to chat with Chiarella and Bird, and during our talk, the two opened up about what it was like making the film and what it was like building connections on set that would help set the groundwork for crafting a memorable, and haunting, queer love story that audiences will be obsessed with for generations.
“It did take me a while to figure out how this film would end and where it would land,” Chiarella said when asked about the intentionality of the film, especially the ending (which we won’t give away!). “I think I drew on the horror movie tradition of ‘What happens to the monster at the end of the movie. Do you ever really defeat it?’ Which is a question I think every horror movie asks when they present their ending, and that had to go hand-in-hand with the love story, so that was very much a big part of it.”
He continued: “I think the idea of ‘Does this thing get stronger the more we're around each other?’ that becomes the question in the second half of the film. And so that was something that we really, really wanted to explore in this movie. And I hope it’s a question we answer for the audience by the end of the film.”
Leviticus is available to stream on demand on Prime Video and Apple TV+ now and will be available to own on Blu-Ray and DVD on September 8.
