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Micro-budget horror from first-time directors has been earning bank at the box office in the past few weeks, and this new Australian horror Leviticus has all of the ingredients that might see its director Adrian Chiarella mentioned in the same breath as Kane Parsons and Curry Barker.
Parsons has just given American film company A24 its biggest ever success with Backrooms taking $200 million at the box office, and a very similar figure has been earned by Barker's Obsession.
Both films were shot for under $US1 million, and their astronomical cost-to-profit ratio is generating a lot of talk about what this might mean for the future of the Hollywood studios, their enormous budgets and imagination-starved sequels.
Adrian Chiarella might well have the Aussie version of this story on his hands with Leviticus, inventive in its approach to scaring the pants off you in a way that feels completely fresh, even as it references some classic horror like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Thing.
Chiarella invents a new screen baddie, bred of banal suburban values and drawn from the terror that is gay conversion therapy, that will have you picking your feet up off the cinema floor and clutching the arm rests.
Awkward and unsure of himself, Naim (Joe Bird) has moved to a new town with his mother (Mia Wasikowska) and is keen to make friends, especially with his lanky blond classmate Ryan (Stacy Clausen).
The pair follow each other home one afternoon, breaking into one of the town's many abandoned factories, and share a kiss that they both agree they must keep a secret from their classmates and especially the church their families have in common.
But when Naim spies Ryan kissing Hunter (Jeremy Blewitt), another boy from the congregation, the demon of jealousy overtakes him and he reports the behaviour to Hunter's father, the church's pastor.
This brings a 'Deliverance Preacher' (Nicholas Hope) to the church, with Ryan and Hunter forced to undergo a ritual cleansing in front of the assembled congregation, and Naim is terrified to see it appear to work, as the boys fall to the floor convulsing.
What the preacher has wrought on the two young men, though, is more horrifying than the public castigation.
They have been cursed with an entity that becomes the object of their desire, and if they surrender to the desire, it will wreak violence upon them.
Worried for his friend, and about his own part in the exposure and the cleansing, Naim is terrified of losing Ryan, and when the Deliverance Preacher turns his hands on Naim, is terrified of Ryan.
Chiarella's genius here is turning the self-hatred of these young gay men into their own personalised demons, one that will keep them always separate from the ones they love most.
It's a double-horror, because this means your gay crush becomes your potential killer, but also, there's the horror of being betrayed by your family members who have arranged for this curse, and stand by complicit.
Canberra's Mia Wasikowska is great as this banal monster, a real grown-up adult role, and does double-duty as executive producer.
The real surprise for fans of Australian horror is that lead actor Joe Bird is the little kid from the Philippou Brothers' 2023 horror Talk to Me, giving a superlative performance.
Scariest of the performers though is Stacy Clausen, playing both the 'real' Ryan and the demon version that haunts Naim, and he had me wanting to sleep with the light on.
Thriftily conceived with not a wasted moment across the film, Chiarella's production team turn the industrial urban locations into a grey landscape of despair.
