Australian Gothic Won't Save Australian Horror

Costume designer Zohie Castellano's work on the horror film Leviticus has drawn praise for embedding monstrosity into everyday clothing—but the film's adoption of Gothic aesthetics reveals a deeper problem: Australian cinema keeps reaching for European visual languages to describe Australian violence, obscuring rather than illuminating what actually happens here.

Leviticus uses costume to blur human and supernatural horror, positioning the threat as internal and normalized

Australian Gothic—as a visual category—is treated as self-evident in contemporary film criticism without examination

The real debate in Australian cinema: whether European Gothic can authentically comment on Australian isolation, landscape, and violence at all