The first time I’d ever heard the name Lillith was because of a role-playing game. In the 90s, Dungeons & Dragons wasn’t quite hardcore enough, so we had to delve into the White Wolf World of Darkness. And tabletop wasn’t hardcore enough, we had to do it live action. That’s right, baby, LARPing ( just like Peter Dinklage in the underrated Knights of Badassdom ).

If you don’t know what LARPing is, it’s where you dress like your character and act out your Dungeons & Dragons game, except we pretended we were vampires and that the basements of our parents’ houses were nightclubs. Instead of rolling dice, we did rock, papers, scissors, and of course we dressed up goth AF.

White Wolf eventually made it to the mainstream with their TV show, Kindred: The Embraced which was a C. Thomas Howell-starring evening soap about vampires using the mythology from the game. I’m sure that FOX thought they were getting a new Dark Shadows , when it was a lot more like What We Do In The Shadows without the unintentional jokes ( it does have a deep bench of 90s’ TV talent though from X-Files’ alien bounty hunter to Lana Lang from Superboy ).

Anyway, in the game, Lillith was known as the “Mother of Vampires”. In the Garden of Eden, she was created from the same clay as Adam and was his original wife. However, Lillith was not interested in being subservient to Adam and eventually was kicked out of Eden after doing the nasty with an angel and also reportedly refusing to be on the bottom when she was getting it on with Adam. She’s only mentioned in the Bible once, but she features more prominently in Jewish mysticism and folklore.

So, she’s associated with sex from the very start and she becomes a boogyeman in medieval Jewish culture. If your baby died in the middle of the night, it was Lillith. If you woke up in the middle of the night and felt a pressure on your chest (like the “Old Hag Syndrome”), it was Lillith. She’s been a bad guy in much more than vampire role-playing games, she’s a villian from Supernatural to Bordello of Blood.

Well, in the intervening centuries, the idea of women being subservient to men has gone the way of other medieval thinking and Lillith has been reinvented as an avatar of feminine strength and defiance (Sarah McLachlan even invoked her name for the women-centric fair that was popluar in the late-90s.)

However, in the new horror-comedy, Porno , which premiered at the 2019 SXSW Film Festival, Lillith is back to being the good ol’ Sex Demon that we all know and love. This time she’s tormenting the poor innocent teenagers working at a small town movie theater.

Drected by Keola Racela and written by Matt Black, Laurence Vannicelli, P o rno is right up the alley for fans of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead or Peter Jackson’s Braindead , it’s ridiculous, scary, over-the-top, and has plenty of boobs and blood. We had a chance to talk to the filmmakers, writers, and the cast of Porno at SXSW and interview them about the film. Here’s some of the things you’ll learn in the conversation:

• The inspiration they took from filmmaker and occultist, Kenneth Anger for their film within a film structure
• What medieval monks have to do with the original mythology of the Succubus
• The real-life spookiness of the semi-abandoned town they shot in New York
• How to keep the right balance of horror and comedy
• Everyone’s favorite and most influential horror movies

With a poster like that, you know you’re going to have a good time!