Adrian Chiarella has always viewed fear as a universal language.
Growing up in a multicultural family in Sydney — with an Italian father and a Chinese mother — the filmmaker knew he couldn't always connect with different parts of his extended family through humour.
"I could tell a joke to someone on my Chinese side of the family and they'd laugh. Someone on the other side of the family would just look at me like I'm a weirdo," he tells SBS News.
"But if I told a story about something scary, I'd have them in the palm of my hand."
As he got older, he understood why. Fear, he says, is primal.
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"It's that biological mechanism in all of us to survive and it binds us together as people," he says.
"It doesn't matter where you're from or what you believe in."
Adrian Chiarella's (right) new film Leviticus will once again take Australian horror to the world stage. This time, it focuses on a queer love story. Source: Supplied / NEON That instinct ended up shaping his debut feature film — Leviticus.
It sparked a bidding war at Sundance Film Festival — a launchpad for some of the biggest independent films of the past four decades — and is now preparing for international release.
But beneath the scares, it's a meditation on the horrors of homophobia — and the power of queer love.
'Homophobia as a type of fear'
The horror follows 17-year-old Naim (Joe Bird, Talk To Me), whose world shifts when he kisses schoolmate Ryan (Stacy Clausen, Scrublands). After a run-in with a conversion therapy preacher, the boys are haunted by a demon that takes the form of whoever they desire most — each other.
Chiarella wanted to make a film about homophobia, but not the kind he'd already seen.
"I wanted to make a film that addressed this idea of homophobia and what it means today," he says.
"We'd made so much progress when I was growing up as a young gay man, but in this last decade or so, things have started to regress a little bit.
"Horror movies are often about an exploration of fear.
So I thought, why not use this genre to explore homophobia as a type of fear?
He initially considered a queer spin on The Exorcist after reading about exorcisms performed on LGBTQI+ teenagers around the world. But the concept wasn't quite right — too close to the thing he was trying to dismantle.
"That concept just feels like it's perpetuating this myth that there's a gay demon," he says.
"I started thinking: what's the opposite of that? I came up with the idea of a horror movie monster or entity that takes the form of what you desire most — that's how it lures you in."
Leviticus sees teenager Naim (Joe Bird, right) fall in love with schoolmate Ryan (Stacy Clausen, left). But things take a turn when the boys are haunted by a demon that takes the form of whoever they desire most — each other. Source: Supplied / NEON The inversion is the film's quiet thesis: the monster isn't queerness. It's homophobia.
That idea is deeply personal. Despite growing up with atheist parents, Chiarella was sent to an all-boys religious school, where he encountered many of the ideas the film interrogates. His extended family included religious relatives he watched struggle with queer people in their lives.
The film draws on all of it — and some of its darkest scenes have nothing supernatural about them at all.
A confrontation in a car park, late at night. No monster in sight. Just people.
Some of the films' hardest scenes were born through Chiarella's experiences at an all-boys religious school. Source: Supplied / NEON "The more real-world the homophobia was, the harder it was to shoot," Chiarella says.
"At its core, this was the moment where the real-world homophobia reared its head — the kind of thing that I think so many of us have witnessed and experienced or heard about.
"It's not veiled behind a metaphor of some supernatural monster. That was really difficult for me emotionally."
The rise of Australian horror
Leviticus sparked a bidding war at Sundance before being acquired by independent distributor NEON, which has released award-winning films including Bong Joon-ho's Parasite (2019) and Sean Baker's Anora (2024).
It's the latest Australian horror film to land one of the world's most coveted distributors — and it didn't happen by accident.
Chiarella is the latest in a string of Australian filmmakers taking horror to the world stage — with the support of a company that has quietly become one of the genre's most reliable export machines.
Australian horror is once again going big overseas. Causeway Films' Samantha Jennings is part of the reason. Source: Getty / Paul Archuleta Causeway Films — the production company behind Jennifer Kent's The Babadook (2014), the Philippou brothers' Talk To Me (2022) and Bring Her Back (2025) and Jon Bell's The Moogai (2024) — has built a reputation for backing debut or early-career Aust…
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