“Leviticus” turns horror ending into an anti-bury trope

Leviticus ending – In “Leviticus,” a conversion-therapy ritual unleashes a shapeshifting demon that keeps two teenage boys apart. The ending refuses the familiar “bury your gays” outcome: Naim survives, reconnects with Ryan in a hauntingly open final frame, and the director fram

When “Leviticus” finally eases into its last moments, the film doesn’t give the audience closure in the usual way. Naim sits at a bus stop. Ryan sits beside him. and the boys share headphones as they listen to Frank Ocean’s “Self Control.” Then the screen tilts—another Ryan is visible standing by the side of the road as the bus drives past. The question isn’t just what the demon is doing this time. It’s what kind of story the film is determined to be.

Adrian Chiarella’s dark. dreamlike horror movie—named for a chapter of the Bible often interpreted as condemning homosexuality—follows two teenagers. Naim (Joe Bird) and Ryan (Stacy Clausen). in a conservative small town. Their parents force them into a traumatic conversion-therapy ritual with a spiritual healer after learning they are gay. After that, the boys begin to have visions of what they desire most: each other. But those visions come with a cruel twist—each “Ryan” is a shapeshifting demon meant to keep them apart.

Chiarella. who says his love for horror classics includes “The Thing. ” “A Nightmare on Elm Street. ” and Hideo Nakata’s “Ring. ” built “Leviticus” around that push-and-pull. He wanted the body horror and jump-scares that horror audiences expect, while also making room for a moving love story. He describes the challenge as capturing the “tension and jealousy and sexuality” between the young men.

The movie’s form mirrors the uncertainty it creates. In intimate meetups. Naim can never be sure whether he’s kissing the real Ryan or an entity that’s trying to kill him. As the threat escalates. the ending arrives after increasingly vicious attacks from Ryan’s specter: Naim traps the demon in a burning building—but not before Ryan delivers a tearful declaration of love that forces Naim to pause. The pause matters. It plants doubt about whether Naim is killing his real boyfriend or the fake one.

Later, Naim talks with his mother, Arlene (Mia Wasikowska). She tells him she knew the healer would curse him with a demon. In Arlene’s account, she wasn’t trying to harm him—she believed she was protecting her son from bullies and from others who might hurt him by making him afraid of being gay.

That distinction—harm presented as protection—drives Chiarella’s broader intent. He says he wanted to explore “all the different shades of homophobia. ” including “a type of homophobia that masquerades as care: ‘Well. it’s not that I don’t like you or I disapprove of you. It’s more I’m worried that you might get hurt by other people.’”.

The film then moves toward escape and aftermath. Naim ultimately decides to run away, leaving Arlene screaming his name as she searches for him. Chiarella contrasts this with a common pattern in queer films: the “moment of revelation” where parents realize they “done wrong” and the relationship is immediately corrected. He argues that repair takes time even when people want it to happen. He says Naim and Arlene might one day reconcile. but “it’s always going to be tinged by what she did to him.”.

One thread connects the separate shocks across the film: conversion-therapy violence. demonized desire. and the parent’s logic of protection all feed the same outcome—fear as a force that keeps returning. Even when Naim makes a physical choice to trap the demon. the ending keeps returning to the emotional question of whether the haunting is only supernatural. or whether it’s also internal.

That’s where “Leviticus” makes its most pointed break from expectation. Chiarella says he wanted the film to push against the “bury your gays” ending “a lot” of audiences have seen. Instead, he aims to show that the two boys are survivors—physically, but also emotionally. He describes it as overcoming the monster “not just physically. but emotionally. ” and says that even with the dark tinge of the final frames. killing one or both characters would have betrayed them.

The movie also leaves room for what comes next. Chiarella says the story is open enough that there could be a sequel—either continuing with Naim and Ryan or shifting to different characters haunted by the same demon. For him, there are also “opportunities to explore other shades of the queer experience.”.

His ending philosophy is tied directly to horror tradition. Chiarella says horror movies often end with “that final frame where the monster’s not really dead. implying that it could still be out there.” He says that idea matches what he wanted for the closing of “Leviticus”—and asks the audience to carry it into their own relationship with what’s personal.

The director’s path to this story runs back to his own upbringing. He says he became a filmmaker because of, of all things, the Bible. Although his parents are atheists. he attended a religious school growing up and remembers being “really lured toward the mythology in the Bible. ” including winning a prize in his religious studies class. He recalls his mother asking what it meant and him saying he didn’t believe the way others did. just that the stories were cool.

Chiarella says “Leviticus” was also shaped by real-world shifts. He says he was inspired to make the movie when same-sex marriage was legalized in Australia in 2017. He also noticed a rise in homophobic rhetoric in public spaces even after the legal victory. He describes feeling like a “portal” had opened up and that “horrible language” seemed to “just stick around.” He adds that in the United States. he sees those ideas moving back into the political sphere—prompting him to address them from a more personal angle than the version he’d seen before.

In the final sequence, the tone lands somewhere between survival and uncertainty. The bus scene—headphones. Frank Ocean. and the sudden appearance of a different Ryan outside the window—turns the familiar horror question into a queer one: does Naim leave the demon behind. or does the haunting follow him no matter where he goes?.

Leviticus Adrian Chiarella Joe Bird Stacy Clausen Mia Wasikowska Frank Ocean Self Control horror ending conversion therapy homophobia bury your gays