No Safe Place: Queer Space, Religious Violence, and Survival in Leviticus

Most horror films generate fear by violating the boundary between a dangerous world and a supposedly protected interior. The killer enters the house. The ghost passes through the bedroom wall. The monster discovers the secluded place where its intended victims have gone to hide. Adrian Chiarella’s Leviticus (2026), however, begins from a more disturbing premise: its queer characters have no reliably protected interior to violate. Naim and Ryan are not safe in the world beyond their homes, but neither are they safe within the domestic, religious, and private spaces that supposedly exist to protect them. Even when they isolate themselves together, the social forces that condemn their relationship follow them inside.

This is the film’s most compelling idea. Queer existence is presented not simply as an identity subjected to occasional hostility, but as a way of moving through a world in which every available space has already been claimed by someone else. Naim and Ryan may physically enter homes, churches, roads, and communal spaces, but they can occupy them safely only when their desire remains invisible, and sometimes not even then. They are only occasionally permitted to be present by leaving the most important part of themselves outside.

The supernatural entity at the center of Leviticus intensifies this condition by taking the appearance of the person each boy most desires. The monster does not merely hunt Naim and Ryan. It turns their desire into a weapon, making the face of the beloved indistinguishable from the face of death. In doing so, it encourages precisely the isolation that their conservative religious community has already imposed upon them. 

If neither boy can trust the appearance of the other, then intimacy itself becomes lethal. Yet their best chance of survival still depends upon resisting that isolation, believing one another, and gradually expanding the circle of people willing to believe them. Leviticus therefore suggests that queer vulnerability becomes a source of strength when it is shared rather than hidden. Like It Follows, the film externalizes sexual stigma as a relentless supernatural pursuer, but it ultimately reverses that film’s logic. Intimacy is not the true contagion in Leviticus. Shame, ostracization, and enforced separation are.

The film’s title immediately places its horror within the language of religious law. Leviticus is a book concerned with boundaries: clean and unclean, sacred and profane, permissible and forbidden. In the context of the film, these classifications become spatial as well as moral. The religious community does not simply condemn queer desire as an abstract sin. It attempts to determine where queer people may stand, how they may appear, whom they may touch, and under what conditions they may remain part of the community. The possibility of belonging is made conditional upon self-erasure.

Naim and Ryan’s relationship must consequently develop in secrecy. Their desire cannot be integrated into the ordinary world of family life and community recognition. It has to be displaced into concealed encounters and temporary refuges. Their surroundings communicate that they can have either intimacy or social belonging, but never both. To choose one another is to risk expulsion from the spaces that have organized their lives. To remain within those spaces is to accept the destruction of their relationship.

The cleansing ritual attempts to resolve this conflict by removing queerness from the boys rather than removing the hostility surrounding them. Its premise is that Naim and Ryan are the problem. Their desire is treated as a foreign presence that can be extracted, exorcised, or disciplined out of existence. Yet the ritual does not eliminate anything. Instead, it produces the film’s monster. The supernatural violence that follows is therefore not a punishment naturally attached to queer desire. It is the consequence of the community’s attempt to eradicate that desire.

Horror cinema has a long history of coding queer sexuality as monstrous, deceptive, predatory, or contagious. Harry Benshoff’s Monsters in the Closet traces how horror films have associated particular monsters with the social conditions under which queer identities were criminalized, pathologized, and forced into invisibility. Within this tradition, the monster often becomes a distorted representation of whatever the dominant culture fears about queer life (Benshoff, 1997).

At first glance, Leviticus might appear to repeat this pattern. The entity assumes the bodies of Naim and Ryan, allowing queer attraction to lead each boy toward something violent. The image of the desired male body cannot be trusted. It may conceal a predator. But the film redirects this familiar symbolism by locating the entity’s origin in the attempted cure. The monster is not generated by the boys’ sexuality. It is generated by the institution that declares their sexuality monstrous.

The entity steals the outward appearance of queer desire, but it does not express the truth of that desire. It is a counterfeit manufactured by repression. Leviticus thus reverses the historical image of the “monster queer.” Queerness is not the invasive force threatening the community. The invasive force is the community’s determination to enter the boys’ most private emotional lives and reorganize them according to its own demands.

The cleansing ritual also resembles sexual-orientation change efforts in more than a metaphorical sense. Conversion practices claim to protect young people from supposedly disordered desires, even though the medical and psychological literature identifies these practices as discredited and harmful. 

A systematic review published in JAMA Pediatrics associates sexual-orientation and gender-identity change efforts with serious psychological distress, depression, substance abuse, and suicide attempts. The authors emphasize that such practices are based upon the false premise that queer identities are pathological (Forsythe et al., 2022). Research specifically examining parent-initiated change efforts has likewise found associations with depression, suicidal thoughts, suicide attempts, and diminished educational and economic outcomes (Ryan et al., 2020).

The supernatural consequences in Leviticus are exaggerated for the purposes of horror, but the logic of harm is not. The intervention creates the suffering it claims to prevent. It implants shame, mistrust, and fear within a relationship that was not inherently destructive. The ritual seeks to save Naim and Ryan from one another, yet it leaves them dependent upon one another for survival while simultaneously making that dependence terrifying. Religious repression not only prohibits their intimacy, but also contaminates their experience of it.

The entity’s ability to assume the form of the beloved is especially cruel because Naim and Ryan have so few sources of safety to begin with. A monster that looked obviously monstrous could be avoided. This entity instead looks like the person who makes an otherwise hostile world bearable. The boys must scrutinize the face they most want to trust, searching for evidence that affection has been replaced by violence. Their love becomes a permanent test of perception.

In this respect, Leviticus is a film about orientation in both the sexual and phenomenological senses of the word. Sara Ahmed describes orientation as the process through which bodies find their way in the world. To be oriented is to know where one stands, what lies within reach, and which paths are available. Social relations are arranged spatially, while normative systems make some directions appear natural and others disruptive (Ahmed, 2006).

The religious community in Leviticus has already established the acceptable direction in which a young man’s life is supposed to move. Family, church, community, and heterosexual adulthood form what Ahmed might describe as a straight line. Naim and Ryan become socially disoriented when their desires move them away from that line and toward one another. Their relationship reveals that what appears natural is actually a carefully maintained arrangement of bodies, expectations, and spaces.

This deviation does not merely threaten their reputations. It changes how they must inhabit the physical world. Spaces that appear neutral to everyone else become threatening because the boys must continually anticipate recognition, exposure, and punishment. They cannot simply enter a place. They must first determine who is present, what those people know, how they might react, and whether the boys’ behavior could expose what the community has forbidden.

Recent sociological research describes a comparable process as “safety framing.” Drawing upon interviews with LGBTQ+ people, Hailey S. McGee argues that marginalized individuals use memory, emotion, environmental cues, and continual reassessment to classify homes, schools, churches, workplaces, and public locations as safe or unsafe. Safety is situational rather than permanent. A space that initially appears welcoming may have to be reclassified as new information becomes available (McGee, 2026).

Leviticus turns this ordinary process of queer vigilance into a supernatural nightmare. Naim and Ryan must repeatedly reassess every location and every person. A familiar place can become dangerous without visibly changing. A familiar face can become the monster’s mask. The world no longer contains stable signs of security because the entity has invaded the very system through which the boys recognize safety.

Public space offers them no freedom. Visibility creates the possibility of surveillance, humiliation, physical violence, or religious intervention. The open world may appear less claustrophobic than the church or family home, but openness only makes the boys easier to observe. Their community has defined queer affection as something that should not be seen, which means that being seen together always carries a threat.

The horror of these spaces does not depend upon an attacker being visibly present. The expectation of hostility is enough to determine how the boys move. They learn to anticipate danger before it arrives. Every moment of affection must include an awareness of who might be watching. Every possible refuge must also contain an exit.

Ilan Meyer’s minority-stress model offers a useful framework for understanding this constant anticipation. Meyer distinguishes between external stressors, such as discrimination and violence, and more immediate internal pressures, including the expectation of rejection, concealment, and internalized stigma. These forms of stress reinforce one another. External hostility teaches the marginalized person to anticipate hostility even when no aggressor is immediately visible (Meyer, 2003).

The entity in Leviticus materializes this relationship between external danger and internal expectation. It is an actual external force, not merely a projection of the boys’ anxieties, but its effectiveness depends upon the fear that the community has already cultivated within them. The monster does not need to invent their uncertainty. It occupies an uncertainty created by secrecy, condemnation, and forced treatment.

This is why it would be insufficient to interpret the entity as nothing more than internalized shame. Such a reading would risk relocating the source of violence back inside Naim and Ryan. The film is more politically incisive than that. Their fear has an external history. The church, family, and wider community have taught them that queer desire leads toward expulsion and catastrophe. The entity then gives that teaching a body.

The danger does not disappear when the boys retreat indoors. Popular ideas of safety often depend upon a simple distinction between the hostile public world and the protected private home. Leviticus refuses that distinction. Home may provide physical shelter, but it cannot offer emotional security when the family itself participates in the regulation of queer identity.

Júlia Pascual-Bordas describes the family home as a political and emotional space in which LGBTQ+ young people negotiate adult authority and pressure to conform to cisheteronormative expectations. Home is not automatically a refuge simply because it is private. It can become a place in which identity is monitored, negotiated, concealed, or resisted (Pascual-Bordas, 2025). This helps explain why the domestic spaces in Leviticus feel so unstable. The boys may be loved as children while being rejected as queer people. Their bodies are welcomed home on the condition that their desires do not accompany them.

That conditionality turns parental care into another form of spatial control. A family may sincerely believe that it is protecting a child while participating in practices that make the child feel unsafe. Research on family rejection among lesbian, gay, and bisexual young adults has found clear associations between rejecting caregiver behaviors and negative mental-health outcomes (Ryan et al., 2009). By contrast, family acceptance predicts greater self-esteem, social support, and general health while protecting against depression and suicidal behavior (Ryan et al., 2010). The difference is not simply whether parents claim to love their child. The relevant question is whether the child is allowed to exist within that love without first being corrected.

Naim and Ryan consequently confront a cruel spatial paradox. The public world is dangerous because they may be recognized. The family home is dangerous because they are already known. Secrecy seems to offer a third possibility, but secrecy cannot produce a permanent safe space either. It provides only a temporary shelter whose continued existence depends upon no one discovering it.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s account of the closet is useful here because the closet is not merely a private room in which queer identity can be stored. It is a social structure organized around unstable distinctions between knowledge and ignorance, secrecy and disclosure, public identity and private desire. The closeted person must continually negotiate who knows, who suspects, who pretends not to know, and what may happen if hidden knowledge becomes explicit (Sedgwick, 2008).

The closet therefore offers concealment without security. It may postpone punishment, but it also isolates the person who depends upon it. In Leviticus, secrecy initially allows Naim and Ryan to protect their relationship from social condemnation. Once the entity begins pursuing them, however, the same secrecy deprives them of witnesses, assistance, and collective knowledge. They possess a truth that others will not believe, and their prior concealment makes disclosure more difficult.

Even isolation with one another cannot solve this problem. The romantic couple is often imagined as a miniature refuge from society, a private world in which two people can protect one another from external judgment. Leviticus dismantles that fantasy. Naim and Ryan can withdraw from the community, but they cannot prevent the community’s violence from entering the relationship. The entity assumes their forms, imitates their presence, and makes each boy question whether the other remains a source of safety.

The outside force does not always need to break through a locked door. It has already entered through the shame attached to their desire. It appears in their hesitation, their inability to trust appearances, and the possibility that seeking comfort from one another may bring them closer to death. The most private space available to the boys, the emotional space between them, has been colonized by an external demand that they separate.

The resemblance between Leviticus and David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows is consequently more than visual. Both films feature a supernatural pursuer that advances with terrifying persistence, adopts familiar human appearances, and transforms ordinary surroundings into unstable fields of danger. Both monsters deprive their victims of the ability to feel securely alone or securely accompanied.

As I argued in “Sex and the Creation of Horror in It Follows”, sex in Mitchell’s film operates simultaneously as the source of the curse, its identifying mark, and its temporary cure. Sexual contact passes the entity to another person. The pursued individual can buy time by creating a new target, but that protection depends upon placing someone else in danger. Intimacy becomes transactional because survival requires the continuation of a chain.

In It Follows, sexual transmission distributes the threat. The more people included in the chain, the greater the distance between the entity and its previous victims. Yet this solution is morally unstable because it treats another person’s vulnerability as a buffer. One survives by ensuring that the monster has someone else to kill first.

Leviticus adopts the pursuing monster while rejecting this transmission model. Naim and Ryan’s intimacy does not create the entity or pass it between them. The religious ritual creates it. Their desire supplies the appearance through which it attacks, but desire itself is not contagious, pathological, or inherently dangerous. The monster is not transmitted through queer intimacy. It is imposed upon queer intimacy by those who attempt to destroy it.

This difference changes the ethical significance of strength in numbers. In It Follows, another person can become an additional link in the curse. In Leviticus, another person can become a witness. The widening of the group does not push danger onto a new victim. It distributes knowledge, responsibility, and the practical work of survival.

The entity depends upon isolation because a solitary victim is easier to disorient. Alone, either boy can be made to doubt what he sees. He must decide whether the figure approaching him is the person he loves or the thing that intends to kill him. Trusting the wrong appearance may be fatal, but refusing all trust produces a different kind of death. It completes the work of the conversion ritual by separating the boys from one another.

Solidarity gives them an alternative way of knowing. When experience is shared, fear is no longer an incomprehensible private event. Someone else can confirm what has happened, remember details, notice changes, and challenge the claim that the victim is imagining his persecution. The film’s “strength in numbers” is therefore epistemological as well as physical. The boys require one another, but the couple itself must eventually become part of a broader network of belief and protection.

This does not mean Leviticus presents queer community as a perfectly safe sanctuary. The film is too aware of how thoroughly violence can penetrate private life to offer such an easy solution. There may be no location in which the external threat simply ceases to exist. Safety is instead presented as a relationship and a practice: believing one another, refusing the shame imposed upon desire, and standing together even when togetherness makes the group more visible.

Isolation turns fear inward, where it becomes shame and mistrust. Solidarity turns fear outward, where its social source can be identified and resisted. A group may still be attacked, but its members no longer have to interpret that attack as proof that their own identities caused it.

This is the deeper importance of the film’s spatial argument. Naim and Ryan are forbidden from every space not because they are always physically expelled, but because every form of inclusion is conditional. They may enter the church as subjects in need of correction. They may remain in the family as long as they conceal or renounce their desire. They may move through the public world provided they do not appear together as lovers. They may isolate themselves in private, but only at the cost of losing the social protection that comes from being known and believed.

They are thus allowed to occupy space only in forms that deny who they are. The apparent choice between concealment and exposure is no real choice at all. Exposure invites external punishment, while concealment internalizes the community’s demand that queer life remain absent. Both possibilities preserve the same spatial order.

The monster enforces that order by ensuring that no escape is complete. It enters public and private spaces, but its most consequential invasion occurs between the boys themselves. By wearing the face of the beloved, it attempts to make queer intimacy participate in its own destruction. It wants Naim and Ryan to conclude that separation is safer than love.

Their resistance consists in reaching the opposite conclusion. Being together does not guarantee safety, and the film never sentimentalizes the risks of queer visibility. Nevertheless, isolation is exactly what the hostile community and the entity require. The boys’ survival depends upon rejecting the assumption that their vulnerability makes their relationship a mistake. They have been endangered by a society that refuses to permit their intimacy anywhere, not by intimacy itself.

Leviticus therefore denies the comforting fantasy that there is always a private refuge beyond the reach of social violence. The closet is not safe. The family home is not necessarily safe. The isolated couple cannot create a sealed world of its own. There is always an external force seeking entry, whether it takes the form of religious authority, family rejection, communal surveillance, or a supernatural imitation of the person one loves.

Yet the absence of a perfectly safe place does not make resistance meaningless. If safety cannot be guaranteed by walls, distance, or concealment, it must be produced through solidarity. Naim and Ryan cannot survive by disappearing one at a time. They survive, if survival remains possible, by refusing to let the force pursuing them determine what their relationship means. 

The horror of Leviticus is not that queer desire may conceal a monster. It is that a hostile world can teach queer people to fear the face of love, and then call that fear salvation.

Works Cited

Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke University Press, 2006.

Benshoff, Harry M. Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film. Manchester University Press, 1997.

Forsythe, Anna, et al. “Humanistic and Economic Burden of Conversion Therapy Among LGBTQ Youths in the United States.” JAMA Pediatrics, vol. 176, no. 5, 2022, pp. 493–501.

McGee, Hailey S. “Safety Framing: How LGBTQ+ Southerners Define Social Space as Safe or Unsafe.” Sex & Sexualities, vol. 2, no. 1, 2026.

Meyer, Ilan H. “Prejudice, Social Stress, and Mental Health in Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Populations: Conceptual Issues and Research Evidence.” Psychological Bulletin, vol. 129, no. 5, 2003, pp. 674–697.

Pascual-Bordas, Júlia. “Resisting and Transgressing Cisheteronormativity at Home: LGBT+ Youths’ Active Strategies.”Sexualities, vol. 28, no. 3, 2025.

Ryan, Caitlin, David Huebner, Rafael M. Diaz, and Jorge Sanchez. “Family Rejection as a Predictor of Negative Health Outcomes in White and Latino Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Young Adults.” Pediatrics, vol. 123, no. 1, 2009, pp. 346–352.

Ryan, Caitlin, Stephen T. Russell, David Huebner, Rafael Diaz, and Jorge Sanchez. “Family Acceptance in Adolescence and the Health of LGBT Young Adults.” Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing, vol. 23, no. 4, 2010, pp. 205–213.

Ryan, Caitlin, Russell B. Toomey, Rafael M. Diaz, and Stephen T. Russell. “Parent-Initiated Sexual Orientation Change Efforts With LGBT Adolescents: Implications for Young Adult Mental Health and Adjustment.” Journal of Homosexuality, vol. 67, no. 2, 2020, pp. 159–173.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Updated ed., University of California Press, 2008.