‘Leviticus’ Director Adrian Chiarella On Intimacy, Sex, and Sense of Touch Amid the Horror

An urgent question looms all over Adrian Chiarella’s tense, sexy horror flick Leviticus: What would you do if the one person you wanted most wanted to kill you? When we are trying to figure out how we feel about sex and our own bodies, the last thing we need is to fight a demonic spirit bent on destroying our lives. Leviticus is a seductive creature, and Chiarella reveals what horror films inspired him and how he played around with the notion of touch and sex in the year’s most dangerous tale of self-discovery.

Centering on the burgeoning relationship between Joe Bird’s Naim and Stacy Clausen’s Ryan, young love is tested to the limit when closeted kids are outed by others and taken to see a deliverance healer. This stranger performs a ritual which triggers an entity to take the form of the person you are currently lasting over, and Chiarella taps into something primal and dangerous that mirrors how queer people have been told their desires are a sickness for decades. Can you trust a gentle caress or a suggestive glance?

I admitted to Chiarella that I was impressed how he threaded sadness throughout his narrative–I don’t remember the last time I saw a scary movie that carried the weight of a broken or tentative heart so deeply. We may have become spoiled to contemporary queer films where the characters can live so freely that we forget some areas aren’t as openly accepting as others. In this case, the other townspeople feel like they are surrounding Naim and Ryan in larger group scenes to the point where you might assume that someone hanging out in the background is as dangerous as the dark force that stalks our young protagonists.

You know that feeling when you are close to kissing someone that you can feel a heat rising in your chest or even radiating in your limbs? You want someone to touch you, and it feels so right that it scares away any feelings that being gay is wrong or that your desire for someone is a bad thing. Chiarella plays on the expansive theme of touch so beautifully that you can almost feel the boys’ hands shaking when they are within close proximity to one another. We see it early on when Naim and Ryan smoke weed together in an abandoned building, but it takes a more lustful turn in a public moment in the back of a bus. That touch is then entirely different when we think about touch can be violent or scary as those same hands try to swing, grasp, and ensnare.

Leviticus opens in theaters on June 19.