Film-maker Adrian Chiarella knows there’s nothing more terrifying than what you’ll read in the news. As a gay man, he has long been horrified by reports of religious leaders everywhere from the US to Indonesia attempting to purge “homosexual demons” from young people as they cry, convulse and vomit. The horror buff in him could see a great scary movie in these modern-day exorcisms – but there was just one problem.
“The more I explored that directly as an idea for a horror movie – like, what if it was literally about an exorcist that comes and performs this ritual? – the more it seemed to justify the belief those people had about a ‘gay demon’,” Chiarella says. So instead, he started asking, “Well, what’s the opposite of that?”
