I spent last summer in the gay mecca of the United States: San Francisco. On my list of must-dos was to watch Leviticus — a queer horror film written and directed by Adrian Chiarella — in theaters once it was released. Seated in the recliner of an AMC in an unfamiliar, urban Bay Area setting, the movie opened with a shot feeling recognizable to a Great Plains native like myself, though it was set in rural Australia: a live frog being swallowed whole by a snake, our two teen boys Naim (Joe Bird) and Ryan (Stacy Clausen) made the morbid onlookers.
On a second watch with a friend in my dorm this year, I considered how the snake is a duplicitous symbol, perfectly teeing up the rest of the film; how the snake acts both as the biblical serpent representing sin yet also, in eating the frog, embodying a necessary, natural cycle, and — I’m getting ahead of myself. Did I enjoy the movie? My response to that would be: Leviticus is the rare sublime sublimation, a fast pass from evaluation straight to analysis. There is, in my opinion, no debate if this movie is “good” or not — it’s masterful. The more worthwhile question is what each of its many moving parts may mean.
So I continue: From the snake scene — a coin whose one side is “sin,” the other “a necessary act of nature” — we follow the boys into an abandoned mill. The viewer will notice, in Leviticus, a keen eye toward setting, which no doubt holds meaning. For American readers, the scenes of rural Victorian Australia evoke Rust Belt pastorals. Precious seconds of the film are paid to posing factories amid smokestacks, telephone wires canopying the underpopulated town.
Naim and Ryan are typical high school boys, trying on masculinity like their fathers’ too-big overcoats: tossing stones at discarded junk in the abandoned mill, roughhousing, pinning one another to the ground and — kissing?
Ryan acts differently in school than he does when the two are alone. Something about being inside the mill, it seems (especially as they return to it, like a crime scene, constantly), grants the boys access to a different breed of intimacy.
The choice to make the town ex-industrial is distinct. The large factories, how they impose themselves upon the town, evoke a masculinity, yet the fact that they are defunct signifies how this masculinity is only a shell, hollowing itself out and resulting in the same-sex acts harbored within.
The town is a Christian community. Immediately after the scene of Naim and Ryan kissing, we are brought into a church sermon; in a later church scene, we learn that Naim’s dad is dead. This second instance of a missing masculine presence further supports how the film problematizes religious arguments blaming homosexuality on the lack of “manly” influence.
Later, arriving unexpected at Ryan’s house, Naim catches him in the backyard with the pastor’s son Hunter, and here enters one of the film’s strange motifs: a stone-throwing game, where the opponents stand apart duel-style and hurl rocks at one another’s chest. The stranger part is that, after this act of consensual and mutual violence, Hunter and Ryan kiss.
Much is happening beneath the hood of this, on the surface, childlike game. The critical elements are that: 1) the players enter willingly and are always in full view of the other and 2) they are unable to move from their fixed position, or to avoid the rocks’ blows.
The first part speaks to the fact that romantic relationships are built upon a mutual agreement; however, in queer relationships, love is only purchased with pain. Still, the bond of these lovers is stronger because they can see each other suffering by one another’s “love” — the stones — and they willingly stay. Weathering the pelts in the name of being able to face your lover is, after all, romantic.
Yes, romantic relationships are choices; however, one’s sexuality is not. As banal as this sentiment is, in Leviticus, it becomes refreshing precisely because of the bare-bones way that message is delivered. Quite literally, the boys cannot change their orientation in this game. They do not face away, twist or contort to avoid the rocks — it seems to be against their silent understanding. Here, an inability to change oneself spatially spells also an inability to change oneself sexually.
Jealous and vengeful, Naim outs Hunter and Ryan to the town pastor, Hunter’s father. In a spectacle the entire congregation was welcomed to, Hunter’s house becomes the work site of a "deliverance healer,” who flippantly performs what he calls a routine ritual on the boys. Ryan behaves almost mockingly until the healer extinguishes his somehow-holy Zippo lighter, at which point both boys writhe and spit bile.
Strange things happen after the healing. Ryan and Hunter are both assaulted by invisible entities, all that’s left of Hunter being his severed head in an attack that Naim witnessed from hiding. When he reports it to the police, they dismiss Hunter’s death as a hate crime, which leads Naim’s mother to summon the deliverance healer for him. Naim, too, is attacked by the invisible entity afterward — but, from his perspective, it was Ryan.
Thus, halfway through the film, the horror’s true mechanic is revealed: in the tradition of movies like The Ring, It Follows and Smile, some entity embodying the form of a romantic love entices victims before killing them. But this time, it’s only those who have seen the deliverance healer — that is, queer people.
Since the curse takes root, there are only two scenes of undisrupted happiness between Naim and Ryan, though both occur on buses.
Ryan gives Naim a hand job on the night bus home. The significance of this setting is that the bus serves as a liminal space, an area of transition. One could argue being queer is itself a liminal experience: everyone holds different beliefs on the humanity of queer people, so their existence and rights are in flux. Just as gum sticks to gum, liminal spaces are conducive to liminal experiences. Therefore, blissful queer existence can only happen, in Leviticus, in an area of transition, such as a bus.
Hunter’s sister blames Ryan for ostensibly turning her brother gay, and Naim for telling her parents. She lures them into a beating, which they escape, but Ryan tells Naim that he won’t see the real him again. The next night, a fake Ryan comes and speaks to Naim through the mesh of a storm door. Things seem to almost function under vampire principles — until “Ryan” breaks a fist through the door, ripping Naim’s hair out.
More intriguing differentiations in Leviticus compared to the rest of the horror movie canon grow with each scene. While everyone has different interpretations and analyses for why, the indisputable fact is that vampires have become symbols for sexuality — if you need proof, look to Twilight.
However, there’s still an element of consent in that vampires need to be invited in. While that expectation lulls the viewer into a false calm, that security is quickly shattered. This stacks onto the movie’s mounting evidence that, when it comes to one’s own orientation, there is no consent asked to “be gay” — it just happens, helplessly.
Following Naim’s final conflict with the entity, he tells his mother that he and Ryan have been getting hurt since the deliverance healer. When his mother only says she can’t help, that they told her it cannot be undone, Naim realizes that she knew what the deliverance healer would do to him. She defends her behavior by claiming that she was told it would help him, adding that she won’t be around forever. “We need fear, Naim,” she rationalizes. “It’s how we survive.”
Here, a bow is tied on the throughline of a nuanced yet not uncommon trend across queer media: mothers, in a deluded attempt to “help” their sons, truly become their sons’ first aggressors. (See the Italian film Fireworks, based on a true story, for another example.)
Naim’s mother goes inside a gas station. When she returns, Naim has disappeared, her frantic search and screams for him crescendoing. The scene cuts to Naim, who has walked to a bus stop where he finds Ryan; as they tacitly, instinctually confirm one another’s authenticity, they board the bus leaving town.
When, looking out the window, Naim sees the fake Ryan standing on the horizon, he lets it be just a blur passing by before — sharing earbuds with his, in no exaggeration, star-crossed lover — he rests his head flatly on a sleeping Ryan’s chest.
In a perhaps unsatisfied review from my friend with whom I watched this movie for my second time (and his first), I find an ending more fitting than any I could write on my own: “Wait, but no matter where they go, it’s just going to be the same thing all over again.”
No matter where we go, it will be the same thing. All over again.
