Manny the Movie Guy Sits Down with Director Adrian Chiarella and Star Joe Bird for "Leviticus" — The Queer Horror Film Everyone Is Talking About

Hey everybody, Manny the Movie Guy here — and if you only see one horror film this summer, make it Leviticus.

I had the absolute pleasure of sitting down with first-time feature director Adrian Chiarella and rising star Joe Bird to talk about their daring, deeply personal new film, and I have to tell you — the passion these two bring to this project is something special. Leviticus is not just a great horror movie. It is a great movie, period. And after spending time with its director and star, I understand exactly why it has been generating buzz since its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival back in January.

Leviticus is in theaters now from Neon. Go see it.

(Check our interview above, then click here for our uncensored chat)

What Is Leviticus About?

The film follows two Australian high school boys — Naim (Joe Bird) and Ryan (Stacy Clausen) — who fall for each other in a small, deeply religious community. When their relationship is discovered, a so-called "deliverance preacher" is brought in to perform what amounts to a conversion exorcism. But something goes terribly wrong. Instead of driving anything out of the boys, the ritual unleashes a demonic entity that takes the form of whoever the person most desires — turning love itself into a weapon of terror.

It is frightening. It is heartbreaking. It is, at its core, a love story told through the language of horror.

Adrian Chiarella: Horror as a Personal Act

Adrian Chiarella is making his feature film debut with Leviticus, and based on this conversation, I can tell you this will not be his last. He is a filmmaker with a genuine point of view — and a personal reason for making this film.

Chiarella, who is openly gay and grew up attending a religious school in Australia, told me he first encountered the Book of Leviticus — with its infamous verse about male intimacy being "an abomination" — as young as thirteen years old. That experience never left him. And in recent years, as he watched homophobic rhetoric re-enter public and political spaces in troubling ways, he knew he had a story to tell.

"I started developing a horror movie where the fear — because horror movies are always about fear — was homophobia," he explained. "That was what we wanted to explore in all of its certain shades."

What makes his approach so smart is the metaphor at the center of the film: a monster that takes the shape of whoever you most desire. It is an elegant, terrifying inversion of conversion therapy's logic — the idea that who you love is the dangerous thing. In Chiarella's film, love is not the danger. The people trying to destroy it are.

He was also meticulous about grounding the film in truth. He and his cast watched documentaries on conversion therapy, and he incorporated verbatim quotes from real testimonies into the script. The horror, in other words, is not invented. It is borrowed from real life — which is what makes it land so hard.

Joe Bird: A Star Who Chose This Film

If you saw Talk to Me — the A24 horror hit that shook audiences a few years back — you already know Joe Bird has something. He was haunting in that film as a teenager. In Leviticus, he steps fully into a leading role, and he is extraordinary.

What I love about Joe's story with this film is how it started. He read the script, was moved by it, tracked down Chiarella's email, and wrote to him — not as an audition, but just to say: this is a great script, and you deserve to know that. Chiarella told me he was floored when he opened that message. "I was super moved," he said. "What an awesome human."

That spirit — generous, collaborative, emotionally open — comes through in every frame of Joe's performance. He plays Naim as a young man who carries a lot quietly, and the way he inhabits that interiority is remarkable for someone so young.

Joe also spoke to me about the preparation process Chiarella put him and co-star Stacy Clausen through before cameras rolled. They did an escape room together. They handled snakes. The goal, Joe told me, was to be scared around each other — to build vulnerability fast. "In hindsight," he said, "Adrian wanted to put us in activities that were rooted in fear so that we could be scared around each other and vulnerable." That vulnerability is exactly what you feel on screen between Naim and Ryan. Their chemistry is completely believable, and that is no accident.

A Conversation About Ambiguity

One of my favorite moments in my interview with Chiarella was when we talked about the film's ending — and its deliberate refusal to give the audience easy answers. As a director, he said he always tries to leave space for the viewer to fill in the gaps.

"I think it's always so much more resonant if you can do that, so people can take their own meaning away," he told me. "So many people have come up to me and given me their own versions of the ending, and it always means something to them individually." That, to me, is the mark of a filmmaker who trusts his audience — and one who will be making important films for a long time.

The title itself reflects this ambiguity. Yes, Leviticus references the Biblical source of so much anti-LGBTQ rhetoric. But the film also asks how much of any edict about how to live comes from the universe — and how much is something we impose on each other. It does not answer that question. It just holds it up to the light.

Why This Film Matters Right Now

Leviticus premiered at Sundance and has been on a remarkable festival journey ever since. It arrives in theaters during Pride Month — and that timing is not incidental. This is a film that speaks directly to the experience of queer young people navigating faith, family, and identity in environments that demand they hide who they are.

But it is also, as Chiarella pointed out to me, a film for everyone. The horror genre has always been at its best when it externalizes internal fears — when it makes invisible dread visible. Leviticus does exactly that. The monster is not metaphorical. It is real and terrifying. But what it represents — the way society tries to weaponize desire, to make people afraid of their own hearts — that is as real as anything in the news.

Joe Bird put it simply and beautifully in our conversation: "I think it's good that these stories are being told, because I feel like sometimes young people may feel misunderstood in this world." He is right.

The Bottom Line

Leviticus, directed by Adrian Chiarella and starring Joe Bird, Stacy Clausen, Mia Wasikowska, and Nicholas Hope, is in theaters now from Neon. It is one of the best films of 2026, full stop — a queer horror revelation that is scary, moving, and impossible to shake.

From Manny the Movie Guy, this one gets my highest recommendation. See it with someone you love.

For more exclusive interviews, reviews, and entertainment coverage, follow Manny the Movie Guy on YouTube (@mannythemovieguy), Instagram (@mannymovies), and at NBCPalmSprings.com.