Neon's "Leviticus," arriving June 19, 2026, is the debut feature from Adrian Chiarella, produced by the team behind "Talk to Me." It stars Joe Bird, Stacy Clausen, and the long-awaited return of Mia Wasikowska. The premise is a knockout: a supernatural entity that takes the shape of whoever you desire most. Early comparisons to "It Follows" are inevitable, and earned. But "Leviticus" is after something "It Follows" only gestured at, and it's after it on explicitly queer terms.
The Monster You Want
Horror has always understood that desire and dread are neighbors. What makes "Leviticus" feel new is that it builds its entire monster out of that adjacency, and refuses to make desire shameful in the old, punishing way. The title alone, lifted from the book of scripture most weaponized against queer people, signals that Chiarella knows exactly what conversation he's entering. This is a film fully aware of the long history of horror using monstrosity as a coded stand-in for queerness, and it flips the convention inside out.
Here, the entity doesn't punish desire. It becomes it. By taking the form of the thing each character wants most, the creature externalizes the most intimate, vulnerable part of a person and weaponizes it. For queer characters in particular, that's a devastating premise, because it dramatizes the specific terror of having your longing turned against you, of being made afraid of the very thing you've been told to be ashamed of. The horror isn't that you want. It's that what you want can find you.
That's a far cry from the genre's bad old habit of coding the gay character as the monster and killing them off for it. "Leviticus" puts queer desire at the center of the frame and treats it as worthy of the kind of cosmic, all-consuming dread usually reserved for slashers and demons. Desire here is sacred and dangerous at once, which is the truth most religious horror is too cowardly to admit.
And then there's Wasikowska. Her return to the genre is reason enough for the date to be circled on every horror calendar. She has always specialized in characters whose still surfaces conceal something feral underneath, and a film about the monstrousness of wanting is the ideal vessel for that gift. If the early word holds, she is the gravitational center the whole eerie machine orbits.
What excites us most isn't the "It Follows" comparison, flattering as it is. It's that "Leviticus" arrives from the producers of "Talk to Me," a film that proved A-list dread can come from genuinely fresh, youth-driven, emotionally raw places. Queer horror has spent decades being told its stories were too niche, too risky, too much. Neon is betting otherwise, on a debut director, on desire as the creature, on a metaphor that finally lets queer longing be epic instead of apologetic. We're betting with them.
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