the mark of lilith

The Mark of Lilith (1986), directed by Bruna Fionda, Polly Gladwin, and Zach Mack-Nataf, is a 32-minute experimental short film that reimagines the vampire myth through an intersectional feminist lens. The film centers on Zena, a Black lesbian filmmaker researching the transformation of ancient goddesses into monstrous figures within patriarchal narratives. Her journey intertwines with Lillia, a white bisexual vampire trapped in a monotonous cycle with her misogynistic partner, Luke. Their encounter occurs within a cinema, blurring the lines between fiction and reality, and propelling both characters into a complex exploration of desire, identity, and resistance.

The film opens with Zena's monologue, where she reflects on the demonization of female deities across cultures, setting the stage for an inquiry into how societal structures have historically vilified powerful women. This thematic concern materializes as Zena watches a horror film featuring Lillia, who, in a metafictional twist, appears to break the fourth wall, acknowledging Zena's gaze. This moment initiates a narrative where Lillia transcends the screen, seeking out Zena, leading to a relationship that challenges and subverts traditional representations of race, gender, and sexuality.​ This essay thus seeks to examine how The Mark of Lilith employs performance to interrogate the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. Drawing on theoretical frameworks such as Judith Butler's concept of gender performativity, Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection, and Christina Sharpe's notion of living "in the wake" of slavery, the analysis will explore how the film critiques and reconfigures dominant narratives. Through its experimental form and content, the film not only portrays marginalized identities but also enacts a form of resistance against the structures that seek to contain them.

Monologue and Research: Reclaiming the Monstrous Feminine

The first few scenes of the film involve a direct address from Zena, the Black lesbian protagonist, speaking in voiceover as she walks through urban spaces. She says:

“What happened to the old goddesses? They turned into monsters. Lilith, Medusa, Kali — they were once powerful, now they are made to frighten children.”

This monologue, layered over handheld camera footage and urban nighttime imagery, introduces the film's central inquiry: how female power, particularly when racialized and sexualized, is systematically distorted by patriarchal narratives. Zena’s voice, steady and analytical, immediately establishes her as a researcher, someone actively seeking to understand the archive of monstrous femininity, but also as a subject speaking from lived experience. This opening scene thus sets the stage for what Diana Taylor calls the “repertoire” (2016), embodied performance as a form of cultural memory. Zena is not just theorizing monsters; she is placing herself in relation to them. Her research is not distant or abstract; it is motivated by a desire to trace the historical forces that have defined women like her (Black, queer, and defiant) as aberrant or abject. Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror (1982) is especially useful here: for Kristeva, the abject is that which society must cast off to preserve its symbolic order, often associated with bodily boundaries, sexual excess, and death. The figures Zena invokes (Lilith, Medusa, Kali) are mythic abjections: women who threaten patriarchal control.

Zena's identification with these figures thus transforms the abject from a position of degradation into one of resistance. She is not afraid of Lilith; she is drawn to her. This aligns with Judith Butler’s notion of the performative subject, who emerges not in the margins of discourse but through the reiteration and subversion of those discourses. Zena performs a kind of citational defiance. She calls on figures of the monstrous to articulate her own identity and to reframe monstrosity as political. Visually, the film mirrors this thematic inversion. The handheld footage and gritty urban setting emphasize mobility and marginality, contrasting sharply with the later sequences of Lillia’s clinical domestic space. Zena moves through the city, dark alleys, underpasses, empty sidewalks, spaces coded as unsafe or liminal. But her voice reclaims these spaces as intellectual and emotional terrain. Her subjectivity is fragmented visually, yet coherently expressed through her speech, inverting of how Black women are often depicted in cinema: seen but not heard, embodied but not interior.

This act of speaking, therefore, disrupts the viewer’s expectations. In most horror films, especially those involving vampirism or monstrosity, the Black woman appears later, often briefly, and usually as a victim. Here, she speaks first. She narrates the myth. She defines the terms.

Watching the Film-Within-a-Film: Fetishization, Spectatorship, and the Racialized Gaze

In one of the film’s most visually striking and thematically loaded sequences, Zena sits alone in a dark cinema, watching a black-and-white horror film. The film she watches is a pastiche of 1960s gothic vampire cinema: grainy, melodramatic, and over-acted. It features Lillia as a sensual, pale-skinned vampire, surrounded by men in tuxedos and women in nightgowns. The scene is absurd, stylized, and pointedly artificial. But Zena is transfixed. The camera cuts between the screen, where Lillia is biting a woman’s neck, and Zena’s face, which is lit only by the projection’s flicker. Zena’s expression is complex: fascination, uncertainty, a growing awareness. Suddenly, Lillia turns her head onscreen and appears to look directly out of the film, at Zena. The gaze lingers. The fourth wall breaks. The two women, in different diegetic spaces, are locked in mutual recognition.

This moment does not just initiate the narrative connection between them. It dramatizes what Laura Mulvey calls the "male gaze" (1975) only here inverted and troubled through a queer, racialized frame. Zena is both viewer and object. She is watching, but she is also being watched. Lillia’s look toward her suggests an uncanny connection that challenges the normal flow of cinematic power, which typically centers white, heterosexual spectatorship. Instead, The Mark of Lilith places a Black lesbian subject at the center of the spectatorial circuit. Judith Butler’s framework helps to illuminate the complexity of this moment. In Gender Trouble (1999), Butler writes that the subject is produced through “a process of materialization”, a reiterative performance of norms. Zena is performing her role as a viewer, but the norms of spectatorship are being rewritten. Her desire is not passive or deviant, but central. The film resists pathologizing lesbian desire and instead positions it as a source of epistemological power: it is Zena’s gaze that initiates the narrative, not Lillia’s seduction. This scene also engages with Brandi Wilkins Catanese’s argument in The Problem of the Color[blind] (2011) that Black performance often exists under a double pressure: to perform race in ways legible to whiteness while simultaneously resisting that legibility. Here, Zena is not simply consuming a film. She is performing a different relationship to the archive. The film-within-the-film is kitsch and historically racist, evoking a cinematic tradition that exoticizes vampires and excludes Blackness entirely. But Zena’s gaze does not accept that exclusion. Her attention rewrites the terms of representation. She does not see Lillia as the erotic white object of desire; rather, she sees a possibility for reimagining desire altogether.

When Lillia appears to look back, the film suggests that the archive can gaze, and be gazed at, differently. This reciprocity destabilizes the binary of viewer and viewed, human and monster, researcher and object. It gestures toward Kristeva’s abject, not as pure horror, but as a space of mutual fascination. Lillia, the white vampire, is monstrous, but she is also a projection of Zena’s inquiry. Zena’s queer Black desire reframes the gothic not as a site of repression, but as a space of confrontation and possibility. Visually, the film emphasizes this through montage. The grainy black-and-white footage dissolves slowly into Zena’s face, then back to Lillia. The editing itself becomes performative, mimicking the collapse of boundaries that Zena theorizes in her monologue. The vampire film, far from being merely an object of parody, becomes a porous site where racialized and queer subjectivities leak across cinematic borders.

Zena Invites Lillia Back to Her Flat: Power, Intimacy, and the Threat of Difference

Zena and Lillia’s relationship takes a turning point as Zena invites Lillia into her flat, a space that starkly contrasts with Lillia’s gothic, dimly lit room. Zena’s flat is warm, colorful, and full of life — vibrant blue walls, yellow curtains, patterned couches, and plants — a direct counterpoint to the cold, muted environment of Lillia’s. The choice of these settings is deliberate: Zena’s flat represents a space of comfort and self-expression, grounded in domesticity and lived experience, while Lillia’s space remains a place of detachment, steeped in her vampiric, predatory past.

As Lillia enters Zena’s home, Zena offers her hospitality with an air of casual ease:

“Have a seat, make yourself at home. Would you like me to take your coat?”
“Would you like a glass of wine? Are you hungry?”

The language Zena uses establishes the tone of mutual respect that underpins the interaction. Zena is not merely hosting Lillia as an object of desire or fascination; she is engaging with her on equal footing, offering her space as a potential partner, not a passive subject. The act of offering wine or food is an overture of connection, not just a polite gesture. These exchanges are laden with subtext: the offer of sustenance is a symbolic invitation for Lillia to partake in a more grounded, human experience. Yet, beneath this, Zena is also inviting Lillia into a realm that is at once tender and challenging, filled with the complexities of race, power, and intimacy.

The setting is crucial here. Zena’s flat, full of color and life, contrasts with the sterile, gothic aesthetic of Lillia’s room, which reflects her past as a vampire caught in the cycle of violence and detachment. The juxtaposition of these spaces underscores the tension between Zena’s grounded existence and Lillia’s tortured immortality. The contrast sets up a dynamic in which Zena embodies life and community, while Lillia embodies death, isolation, and repression. Yet it is precisely within this contrast that the scene deepens: Zena, as a Black lesbian woman, offers Lillia a chance at something that transcends her existence as a monster: the possibility of reciprocity, connection, and transformation.

In a moment that contrasts sharply with Lillia’s previous predatory behavior toward women, the two share a tender kiss and embrace in Zena’s room. Their bodies entwine in a mutual embrace, their hands exploring each other’s skin in a tender, languid sequence that emphasizes reciprocity. The kisses are gentle, the embrace intimate and personal. The physicality of the scene is marked by mutual agency, unlike the typical predatory dynamic that Lillia shares with her vampire lover, Luke. In earlier scenes, Luke’s treatment of women is objectifying, eroticizing their helplessness and framing them as passive sensual objects for his consumption. In stark contrast, the embrace between Zena and Lillia feels organic, a tender exploration of each other’s bodies and desires.

The choreography of their intimacy here is crucial. As Zena and Lillia wrap their bodies around each other, the tangled limbs symbolize not only sexual desire but also emotional and psychological entanglement. Their embrace is a moment of connection and trust, and yet it is also fraught with the awareness of the tension between their histories: one of survival, and the other of violence and predation. This scene reflects Judith Butler’s concept of performativity: the idea that gender, sexuality, and power are not inherent but performed through repeated acts and interactions (1999). Here, Zena and Lillia perform their sexual intimacy as an act of agency, subverting the roles traditionally imposed on Black lesbian and white vampire figures in horror narratives.

However, the tenderness of their exchange is soon disrupted by Lillia’s instinct to bite Zena, a visceral reminder of her predatory nature. In an intense moment of rejection, Zena jumps away and responds sharply:

“Can’t you see what I am? I thought you knew… It’s my instincts. You don’t understand how much of a threat you are to me.”

Lillia’s desire to bite Zena, to turn her into a victim and to reassert her power, exposes the cracks in their budding intimacy. Lillia’s admission reveals the violence that continues to haunt her: she cannot escape the dynamics of her vampiric existence, one that involves the exploitation and consumption of others. Zena, however, refuses to be reduced to the victim. Her response is defiant:

“What the fuck are you talking about? Who’s got the power to threaten who?”

Zena’s response is a crucial turning point in the scene. She refuses to accept the subjugation that Lillia’s predatory nature seeks to impose. Instead, Zena insists on a reciprocal power dynamic. One in which she is not a passive victim but an active subject with the ability to challenge and confront Lillia’s threats. This moment invokes Christina Sharpe’s concept of the "wake" (2016) — the lived experience of Blackness as one that is constantly aware of and shaped by histories of violence, but also one that finds power in resistance. Zena does not simply accept the threat Lillia embodies; she challenges it, reasserting her own agency in the face of both Lillia’s internal contradictions and the larger societal forces that have shaped both of their lives.

Lillia, shaken by Zena’s words, admits her struggle:

“I realized tonight that I can and do misuse my power…”

Zena, however, does not immediately offer forgiveness. Instead, she asks:

“Why should I trust you?”

This moment is critical for several reasons. It marks the intersection of race and trust — Zena, as a Black lesbian woman, has a deep historical awareness of the dangers of trusting those who have historically oppressed or objectified her. Trust, in this moment, cannot be easily given; it must be earned through acknowledgment, change, and the disruption of harmful cycles. Lillia’s response signals her own internal reckoning. Yet, Zena remains skeptical, offering a piece of wisdom that reshapes the conversation around power:

“You don’t have to accept the expectations… I do want you to remember the past. It’s so important for women to exchange knowledge. You don’t have to be a parasite or a victim.”

Zena’s words here directly challenge the vampiric model of victimization that both women are entangled in. She urges Lillia to move beyond her status as a victim (to the violence of her past) and a predator (to those around her). The exchange of knowledge between women, particularly women who have been marginalized, is framed as an act of empowerment and resistance.

Zena’s final address to the audience brings the scene full circle:

“It comes across if you are Black or lesbian in this society, you must be repressed, out of sight, or even destroyed for someone’s safety. If you are visible, you become a threat, a threat to what? White heterosexual so-called normality. We become the nightmare monster, the other.”

Zena’s words crystallize the film’s overarching critique of societal repression and racialized and gendered violence. As a Black lesbian, Zena understands deeply how being visible, how asserting one’s identity, can be seen as a threat to normative structures of power. She challenges both Lillia and the viewer to see these dynamics of oppression clearly, to recognize them, and to dismantle them.

From Object to Being

The progression of Zena and Lillia’s relationship from detached observers to dialogic participants reflects a crucial breakdown of colonial and gendered structures of looking. Initially, both women regard one another through a distanced, voyeuristic lens: Zena, as a researcher of vampires and monstrosity, approaches Lillia with clinical fascination, while Lillia, cast in the role of both seductress and supernatural being, gazes back with predatory intent. This mutual positioning invokes Sartre’s (1943) conception of the look, wherein "individuals who find themselves artistically represented are positioned as the Other… their beings are reduced to a mere likeness" (Halliwell, 1988), forcing each woman to see herself and the other through a dehumanizing exterior. Zena becomes the fascinated ethnographer and Lillia the eroticized vampire, both rendered literal objects and material goods for aesthetic enjoyment.

However, the intimate scene in Zena’s flat marks a rupture in this representational impasse. Their conversation moves beyond spectacle, breaking down the rigid binaries that have defined their interactions and their identities. As Julia Kristeva writes in Powers of Horror (1982), abjection is "what disturbs identity, system, order... the in-between, the ambiguous, the composite." The women’s embrace of mutual vulnerability — Lillia’s confession and Zena’s refusal to be victimised — enacts a confrontation with the abject, with uncomfortable conversations. No longer confined to roles of monster and observer, they step into the in-between space, the abjected zone where borders between self and other, subject and object, dissolve. The film subverts the male and colonial gaze. Instead, Zena becomes not the object of fear or desire but a subject who speaks, theorizes, and resists, shifting the frame from eroticised containment to epistemological exchange. Their encounter thus models a politics of performance that, by embracing the abject, also embraces the possibility of reconfiguring how Black queer female subjectivity is represented and understood.

Conclusion

The Mark of Lilith thus stages a radical intervention into the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and power through its fragmented, reflexive narrative and richly symbolic mise-en-scène. By centering a Black lesbian protagonist, Zena, the film subverts dominant gothic and horror conventions, repositioning the so-called “monster” not as a source of fear but as a site of resistant knowledge. Through her interactions with Lillia, Zena enacts a performance of critical selfhood that refuses both victimhood and erasure. Their dialogue confronts the racial and gendered hierarchies embedded in desire, representation, and memory, and powerfully illustrates how intimacy can become a battleground for historical reckoning.

Ultimately, the film offers a vision of queer Black femininity that is neither monstrous nor idealized, but deeply human. One marked by conflict, contradiction, and transformation. In doing so, it exemplifies what Diana Taylor (2016) calls the transmission of knowledge through performance: a feminist pedagogy enacted not in textbooks but in bodies, gestures, and looks. Zena’s journey is not only a critique of historical violence, but also a blueprint for how resistance might be lived, staged, and remembered.

References

Butler, J. (1999). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity (2nd ed.). Routledge. (Original work published 1990)

Catanese, B. W. (2011). Transgressing tradition: Suzan-Lori Parks and Black performance (as) theory. In The problem of the color[blind]: Racial transgression and the politics of Black performance (pp. 112–142). University of Michigan Press.

Sharpe, C. (2016). In the wake: On Blackness and being. Duke University Press.

Taylor, D. (2016). Framing [performance]. In Performance (pp. 1–30). Duke University Press.

Halliwell, S. (1988). Plato: Republic X. Liverpool University Press.

Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of horror: An essay of abjection. Columbia University Press.