There are some worthy and intriguing ideas at work in The Mark of Lilith but they are so clumsily obscured by obvious metaphors and muddled allegory as to be virtually lost from sight. The invocation of the spirit of Lilith as an analogue for the 20th century archetype of the predatory female vampire is particularly intriguing but like far too many films that have something to say, made by undoubtedly committed artists, the idea is presented in a manner more likely to provoke tedium than thought.

A black lesbian filmmaker, Zena (Pamela Lofton), is researching how ancient goddesses devolved over time into demonic figures, drawing parallels with the way that society treats black and lesbian women, and spends a lot of her time watching horror films. One of the films features white female vampire Lillia (Susan Franklyn) who rejects her undead onscreen lover Luke (Jeremy Peters) and makes her way to the real world where she starts an affair with Zena.

Watching Mark of Lilith is like attending a lecture – characters continually hammer home the point with an utter lack of subtlety, Zena at one point actually facing the camera to deliver a sermon on the nature of horror in art. Intellect in a horror film is a quality never to be sneered at, but when it produces well-intentioned but muddled work like this one is forced to question its relevance. Directors Bruna Fionda, Polly Gladwin and Isiling Mack-Nataf spend too much of their meagre running time lecturing their audience rather than trusting them to work it all out for themselves. It’s all rather dry and ironically anaemic, lacking in much passion or fire.

As a contribution to the debate on the depiction of women in art it’s simply too preachy for its own good, lacking the subtlety that might have allowed its message to be better appreciated – a thinking audience invariably likes to work things out for itself rather than be lectured at from the screen. As a vampire movie it had the potential to take a refreshing stance on the lesbian vampire motif so favoured in the 1970s. As it is, it misses that opportunity but does contain a neat summation of what it is that makes the horror genre work, indicating that its three directors were at least familiar with the field in which they were working: “Have you ever noticed how the horror genre can be the most progressive popular genre? It refuses to accept our lot. It brings up everything our society represses. (It) dramatises the repressed as the ‘other’ in the figure of the monster, and normal life is threatened.”