Leviticus: A Bloody Study of Sin and Sincerity

Last summer I found myself in San Francisco, the unofficial capital of queer culture, with a simple goal: catch Adrian Chiarella’s new horror film, Leviticus, as soon as it hit the big screen. I settled into an AMC seat, the smell of buttery popcorn mixing with the cool Bay‑Area breeze, and the opening image struck me like a déjà vu from the Great Plains – a snake gulping a frog whole, while two teenage boys, Naim (Joe Bird) and Ryan (Stacy Clausen), watched with a mix of horror and fascination.

When I revisited the film later, this time on a dorm couch with a friend, the snake stopped being just a creepy creature. It became a double‑edged symbol: on one side, the biblical serpent of temptation, on the other, a perfectly natural predator doing what nature demands. That tension – sin versus necessity – sets the tone for everything that follows.

From that opening, the boys wander into an abandoned mill, a place that feels simultaneously timeless and industrially scarred. The film’s visual language leans heavily on the decaying factories, soot‑capped smokestacks, and tangled telephone wires that loom over a near‑ghost town. To an American eye the scene reads like a Rust‑Belt dream, a reminder that the machinery of masculinity can be both grand and empty.

Naim and Ryan act like any other high‑school boys at first – tossing rocks at rusted junk, rough‑housing, even sharing a hesitant kiss. Yet their chemistry shifts the moment they step inside that mill. The space feels like a secret chapel where their usual masks slip, allowing a tenderness that never appears at school. It’s as if the crumbling walls grant permission to be vulnerable.

The town itself is a devout Christian enclave, and the film cleverly juxtaposes its pious veneer with the boys’ secret world. Right after a brief, tender kiss, we’re thrust into a church sermon, then later learn that Naim’s father is dead – an absent masculine figure that mirrors the hollowed‑out factories surrounding the town. The absence is a quiet critique of the way some religious arguments blame homosexuality on a lack of “manly” guidance.

A particularly strange sequence unfolds when Naim catches Ryan in the backyard with Hunter, the pastor’s son. The trio engages in a stone‑throwing game – opponents stand apart, hurling rocks at each other’s chests before sharing a kiss. On the surface it’s oddly childlike, but the ritual holds weight: the participants willingly stay in place, taking the blows together. It reads like a metaphor for queer love that, while beautiful, is often forged in pain, and that pain is accepted because the lovers can see each other suffering.

The rules of the game also underscore a darker point: while relationships are choices, sexuality isn’t. The boys cannot turn away from the rocks, just as they cannot turn away from who they are. The static positions become a visual shorthand for the immobility forced upon them by a hostile community.

Things take a darker turn when a jealous Naim rats out Hunter and Ryan to the pastor. The congregation gathers as a so‑called “deliverance healer” stages a bizarre ritual in Hunter’s home. The healer snuffs out Ryan’s holy Zippo lighter, and both boys convulse, spitting bile as an unseen force seems to claw at them.

After the ritual, the horror escalates. Invisible entities assault Ryan and Hunter, the latter ending up decapitated – a scene Naim witnesses from hiding. The police brush the murder off as a hate crime, prompting Naim’s mother to call the healer for her son. Even Naim isn’t spared; he’s later attacked by the same unseen force, which he mistakenly believes is Ryan.

At this point the film aligns itself with the likes of The Ring or It Follows: an otherworldly curse that feeds on those who have seen the healer’s ritual. The curse is intimate, masquerading as love, and it kills the very people who dared to love differently.

Amid the relentless dread, there are fleeting moments of ordinary joy, both set on buses. One night, Ryan gives Naim a hand‑job on a night‑bus, a brief, tender exchange that feels almost sacred. The bus, a liminal space between destinations, mirrors the liminality of queer existence – constantly navigating between acceptance and rejection, between visibility and invisibility.

Leviticus doesn’t ask whether it’s “good” or “bad.” It delivers a masterful blend of symbolism, setting, and raw emotion that forces the viewer to sit with discomfort. The snake, the decaying mill, the stone‑throwing game, and the cursed healer each layer meaning upon the next, turning a horror flick into a meditation on sin, sincerity, and the price of love in a world that wants to erase it.