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Obsession dethroned as highest treated horror of the year only three weeks after release

Leviticus is coming for its crown

Oreoluwa Adeyoola
4th June 2026, 16:48
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Curry Baker’s Obsession has been the highest-rated horror film of the year until recently, as queer flick Leviticus gains huge critical praise.

Just a few weeks ago, YouTuber Curry Baker’s feature film, Obsession, hit theatres. Its clever marketing strategy and enthralling trailer drew a decent crowd, and through word of mouth, it quickly skyrocketed at the box office. Beyond its commercial success, the psychological horror has also received considerable praise from critics.

But now, another horror is chasing at its tail. Leviticus, directed by Adrian Chiarella, premiered at the Sundance Festival earlier this year. Now, the film has received a Rotten Tomatoes score of 97%, one per cent higher than Obsession.

In Leviticus, two young boys must defeat monstrous entities hellbent on destroying them. Adrian said a recent rise in homophobia inspired the film.

“I noticed things starting to regress,” he told The Sydney Morning Herald. “I noticed little microaggressions of homophobia in day-to-day life. And then I noticed a lot of rhetoric in public spaces and political discourse. I thought, ‘Did homophobia become OK again? When did all this become acceptable?’.”

The director continued: “It doesn’t matter if you’re making a slasher movie or a psychological horror or a supernatural horror, they’re always about fear.”

“At some point you understand what it is that the main character is really scared of. I thought, well, homophobia is a type of fear. I played around with that idea for a long time: how can I make a horror movie about homophobia?”

When coming up with the idea for the film, Adrian looked to older cult-classic horror movies for inspiration.

“I thought, ‘Maybe we’ll do something like The Exorcist, but with a queer theme to it’,” he said. “But every variation I came up with just seemed to justify this belief that there was some sort of gay demon.”

“So I thought, ‘What’s the opposite of that?’ Then I started to come up with this idea of ‘what if there’s a horror monster, but it takes the form of the person you’re most attracted to?’ Once I had that, I was able to dig into the other half of the film that I was really excited about, which was telling a love story.”

Leviticus is out in US theatres on 19th June, but is still awaiting a UK release date.

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Featured image via Neon