Horror's Hottest Summer Trend: Queer Terror and the Cost of Hiding

This summer, indie horror is having a moment—and the genre’s latest breakout, Leviticus, is proof that fresh storytelling beats franchise fatigue every time.

After the surprise success of Obsession and Backrooms, Australian filmmaker Adrian Chiarella’s Leviticus arrives with something more ambitious than jump scares and gore: a genuinely unsettling exploration of what happens when a town’s fundamentalism turns love into a curse. The film, picked up for distribution by Neon following its Sundance premiere earlier this year, centers on two teenage boys—Naim (Joe Bird, who debuted in the 2022 Aussie horror film Talk to Me at just 14) and Ryan (Stacy Clausen)—living in a drab rural Australian town where powerlines hum and churches are made of cinderblocks. They fall in love. They explore abandoned buildings, get high, and steal kisses. Everything changes when their relationship comes to light and the town’s adults bring in a deliverance healer to perform what’s essentially conversion therapy.

Here’s where Leviticus gets genuinely horrifying. The ritual doesn’t just leave them traumatized—it summons something that hunts them. An unseen force scratches, claws, lifts them by the throat. But when we finally see the entity, it’s taken the shape of the one thing they desire most: each other. Naim sees his beloved Ryan’s face on his tormentor. Ryan sees Naim. Neither can trust what they’re seeing. Neither knows if they’re being held by their lover or something wearing his face.

What makes this brilliant is that the real monster isn’t supernatural at all—it’s the adults around them. Naim’s mother Arlene (Mia Wasikowska) tells her son the ritual will save him from anti-gay violence, completely oblivious that she’s inflicting violence herself. The town’s shopkeepers, police officers, and religious leaders all fail them. The terror isn’t that their desire is wrong; it’s that they’ve been taught to believe it is.

This connects to something deeper about horror as a genre. Director Adrian Chiarella notes in press materials that we’re drawn to horror partly because we watch heroes be terrorized, but also because we see ourselves as the monster—what it means to be demonized and pushed to society’s fringes. That’s especially potent given horror’s long queer subtext, from James Whale’s early films to Nightmare on Elm Street 2 to Scream. Leviticus doesn’t hide that subtext; it puts it center stage and makes it the entire point.

The film isn’t fun in the way Obsession or Backrooms are. It’s beautiful and deeply uncomfortable, which is exactly what makes it work. In a year when Hollywood keeps remaking the same tired properties, Leviticus proves there’s an audience hungry for horror that actually has something to say—and isn’t afraid to say it about the people we’re supposed to trust most.