Costume designer Zohie Castellano hides monsters in plain sight for Leviticus

If you are looking for the next “why does this feel so alive” horror hit, Leviticus has a very specific answer hiding in plain sight. Costume designer Zohie Castellano is the one steering that spell. In an IndieWire conversation, she describes how she built the film’s Australian Gothic costumes to conceal monsters in ways that do not announce themselves, making the movie’s yearning land as something as vast as the outback.

That “monsters, but make it subtle” idea matters because Leviticus is not selling fear through obvious props or loud reveal moments. The Neon release, now in theaters, leans on visual design that stays just off-kilter. Castellano’s approach, as IndieWire frames it, is about hiding monsters in plain sight, so the audience has time to project, notice, and then re-notice. You see something. Then you realize you were seeing something else all along. That rhythm is the emotional engine of yearning that reads bigger than the frame.

For executives and investors, this is a useful pattern. Horror is one of the entertainment sectors where production design, wardrobe, and art direction can move the needle because they directly shape what audiences remember. When “world-building” sounds like a buzzword, costumes are where it becomes a measurable experience: costumes dictate how characters occupy space, how themes show up without dialogue, and how tension accumulates over time. If a film can make viewers feel like the monster was there the whole time, it is not just a trick. It is a repeatable craft decision, one that can translate across campaigns, trailers, and word-of-mouth.

Castellano’s Australian Gothic angle also signals something about market differentiation. The horror summer rush tends to reward speed, familiarity, and easy-to-summarize scares. Leviticus is competing on aesthetic specificity, anchored in a recognizable regional mood and a genre lineage that has long leaned into dread, decay, and the uncanny. IndieWire’s description of “Australian Gothic costumes” is not decorative. It is the language of the film’s tension. The costumes become a narrative device, and that changes how the movie plays in theaters, especially for viewers who want atmosphere as much as they want scares.

There is also a second-order implication for the people funding and overseeing releases: the approval pathway is not only about script and talent. Even when there is no explicit regulatory plotline in IndieWire’s piece, the reality of film distribution means creative choices still have to survive institutional constraints, including content review norms and marketing standards. Horror films can be particularly sensitive because imagery and tone are scrutinized during promotion and in some screening contexts. A film that expresses menace through wardrobe design and controlled visibility can be easier to position than something that requires graphic imagery to communicate threat. Castellano’s “hiding monsters” concept fits that kind of strategic flexibility, where the brand promise can remain high-tension without forcing the campaign to show everything.

From a boardroom perspective, the stakes look even clearer. Horror successes tend to compound. A well-regarded genre film does not just perform at the box office or on day one streaming windows. It builds a reputation that attracts audiences to future projects, raises the bargaining power of the filmmakers, and improves the odds that next deals clear faster because risk feels lower. IndieWire calls Leviticus “one of the best horror movies of the summer,” and that kind of critical signal is the lifeblood of the pipeline, because it reduces the uncertainty that typically haunts genre investing.

So the “why now” is not only that Leviticus is in theaters. It is that the film demonstrates a mechanism for making horror feel deeper and more personal. Castellano’s monsters-in-plain-sight design turns the viewer’s attention into a co-pilot. That turns rewatch value into something more than mechanics. It becomes theme recognition. If executives are thinking about what wins in an overcrowded attention market, this is the takeaway: the best horror increasingly feels like it is engineered, not improvised. Wardrobe and production design are not back-end details. They are the difference between a scare you forget and a dread that stays.

For peers planning releases, greenlighting budgets, or shaping go-to-market narratives, the strategic question is simple: where else can your films make the audience do work, in a good way? Castellano’s approach suggests that the answer might be in the quiet choices. Hide the monster. Control the reveal. Let yearning do the heavy lifting. That is not just a creative note. It is a competitive advantage.

And for the rest of us, the buyer’s guide to “what should I watch?” is suddenly less mysterious. If Leviticus is delivering vast yearning through Aussie Gothic costume craft, then the monster is not only on screen. It is also in the design philosophy, and it is waiting for you to notice.