INCUBUS (1966)

One of only a tiny handful of films made completely in the constructed language of Esperanto, Leslie Stevens’s Incubus premiered at the San Francisco International Film Festival two days before I was born in 1966. I was going to say that I hope I’ve stood the test of time better, but in truth the problem with Incubus isn’t that it’s dated (though it is)… the problem is the Esperanto.

Not that the language itself is at fault. Subtitling makes it no more alien than any foreign language, and in fact, if you’re at all familiar with any Romance tongue, it’s not difficult to recognise quite a few words; Esperanto is pretty guessable-at. “Director of photography”, for example, is “cefa fotografisto” (the resemblance of “cefa” to “chief” and cognate terms is clear) while “musik-produktisto” as a music credit scarcely needs explanation.

However, by the time “fino” marks “the end”, one may well be breathing a sigh of relief, for the use of a language, which none of the cast understood (they rehearsed in English to get a sense of each scene’s meaning, then spoke their lines phonetically) results in deadeningly un-nuanced performances. They are, literally, speaking dialogue that they barely comprehend, despite undergoing some Esperanto training before the short shoot.

Some of the actors attempt to make up for this with exaggerated physicality, and indeed it’s quite rightly suggested in one of the bonus features that Incubus would work equally well as a silent movie, but mostly the result is a great deal of meaningful staring rather than acting that creates any sense of a character. It probably also doesn’t help that the dialogue (also written by Stevens) is so plain and literal, more like the kind of text you’re asked to translate in a language exam than anything someone would actually say; I’d hazard a guess that the lack of a significant body of Esperanto literature, or a significant number of people speaking it in everyday life, means that it has not had the chance to develop the kind of idioms which bring a language fully alive. It is, indeed, intended as a practical means of communication rather than a language for art.

Incubus was the second of what seem to be three feature-length films fully in Esperanto, preceded just a couple of years earlier by Angoroj (1964) in France and followed four decades later by the Brazilian film Gerda Malaperis! (2006), the latter based on a 1983 Esperanto-language novella of the same name. A few other movies have used Esperanto along with other languages (e.g. 1999’s Tuvalu), and shorter films have also been made in the language (e.g. 2007’s La Patro), but its commercial potential is obviously severely limited by the small number of speakers.

In fairness, however, it should be noted that Stevens appears to have deliberately chosen Esperanto for Incubus precisely because it would not be familiar to Anglophone audiences, rather than out of any particular passion for the language, so this film may not be showing Esperanto off at its best—certainly, there is little to suggest that Incubus would have been a great movie in any language, though it could have been a better one if written in English.

It starts well enough with a backdrop of arcane symbols and eerie music accompanying the titles, building up a sense of mystery, before plunging straight into the story. The location and time are unidentified—in effect this is an alternate world, and we see so little of it that it’s impossible to know much about it. Even the costumes are imprecise, vaguely resembling the streamlined versions of 1960s fashions seen in many futuristic sci-fi movies of the period, but also suggesting the 18th or 19th-centuries in some respects.

In the village of Nomen Tuum, we are told, there’s a well with magical properties: it can heal the sick, but it can also make the healthy more beautiful. As a result, this “place of dark miracles” has become a “searching ground for demons” preying on the vain, among them Kia (Allyson Ames) and Amael (Eloise Hardt), two succubi whose weird hair accessories suggest horns (perhaps a sign of Incubus’s low budget).

We see Kia in action almost as soon as the film starts, luring a man (Robert Fortier) from the well into the sea, where she drowns him. But Kia is a frustrated demon: she wants a bigger challenge, she wants to corrupt a good man, “find a saint and cut him down” for the “God of Darkness”. Such a man soon comes into her view in the shape of Marc (William Shatner), a soldier living with his sister Arndis (Ann Atmar) while he recovers from his wounds. Presumably, he’s recovering well; he seems a model of health.

Kia appears to him, pretending to be sick herself, and needless to say, he falls in love with her implausibly quickly. Perhaps this is the result of a spell, but if so, it’s not a very efficacious one, because he’s quite willing to stand his ground when he disagrees with her. However, this is essentially a fairytale, and things now progress much as you might expect, with Kia trying to tempt Marc to consummate their relationship but Marc insisting he will not do so until they are married—a difficult proposition because his demon girlfriend can’t stand to be in a church.

The magic well is pretty much forgotten, but towards the end Incubus does dial the horror up a little, with a dark bat-like figure glimpsed effectively through the mist and a brief, sinister scene of hooded figures at a ceremony. All this is leading up to the eventual disinterment of the titular incubus (Milos Milos), a male demon to be unleashed on Marc and his sister after it becomes clear that Kia’s attempts to seduce him are going nowhere. The incubus in fact plays a relatively unimportant role in the film, which then ends—to its credit—with a twist you might actually not have foreseen.

The demonic goat that also appears towards the conclusion has more impact than most of the cast. Shatner, who had just weeks earlier appeared on TV in the role of Captain Kirk on Star Trek (1966-69) for the first time, delivers the only half-decent performance; there is at least some sense he might be a real person, rather than an actor mouthing lines in a language he doesn’t understand. (The Esperanto of Incubus is, apparently, poorly pronounced as a result, too.) Among the others, Atmar’s Arndis is especially terrible—she has a wide range of expressions, but all of them are variations on “pained”.

There are a few positives. Dominic Frontiere’s musical score is well-suited to the setting and storyline, and the cinematography by Conrad Hall can be very striking. Hall would later be a three-time Academy Award-winner—with his first, for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), coming just a few years after this—and he wrings every last bit of visual interest from the mostly exterior settings, filmed near Big Sur on the Californian coast. (The only interior seen for any duration is the “cathedral” where Marc wants to wed Kia, in fact the Mission San Antonio de Padua in the same area of California.)

Hall’s compositions are often careful without being overly contrived, natural shadows add depth, even small elements like tree branches are exploited to the full. A few dissolves—including one very fast one, just after Kia has dramatically fled from the cathedral—are judiciously employed too.

There are occasional interesting ideas in Incubus too—in particular the way that the succubi Kia and Amael invert normal standards by seeing Marc’s purity as not just a practical problem but as downright offensive, and speak of him subjecting Kia to “holy rape”. The premise is not a bad one, and for a while, the dreamlike atmosphere (to which the music, the Esperanto dialogue, and even the minimal production values necessitated by the low budget all contribute) works well. Cut back, it might even have made a fine episode in a TV anthology series; Stevens, indeed, enjoyed his biggest success with the Twilight Zone-like series The Outer Limits (1963-65).

But neither these, nor Hall’s cinematography, are enough to overcome the bigger problems. With a script as wooden as the actors’ delivery, Incubus simply becomes tedious—and its use of Esperanto starts to seem not only a pointless exercise but one that actively damages a film which at least had the potential to be half-decent.

USA | 1966 | 74 MINUTES | 1.85:1 • 1.37:1 | BLACK & WHITE | ESPERANTO

4K Ultra HD Blu-ray Special Features:

• 4K High Definition (1080p) Blu-ray presentation. Incubus was long believed to be a lost film until a 16mm print was unearthed in a French archive in 1996. This formed the basis of the first home media release in 2001 (from which several of the bonus features on this disc come). However, in 2023, a 35mm print was also found, and it’s this—restored by Le Chat Qui Fume, a French specialist in rare and cult cinema–that we see on this Arrow Video disc. At a couple of points, burned-in French subtitles are visible (it’s unclear whether this is because the restorers had to rely on the 16mm print, which had such subtitles, for a few moments), but this really does nothing to detract from a very successful presentation. The visuals are the best aspect of Incubus and they are well served.
• Alternate 1.37:1 presentation of the film. This “open matte” version shows slightly more image at the top and bottom, resulting in a squarer frame than the 1.85:1 widescreen version. The difference is noticeable but not dramatic.
• Original lossless mono audio.
• Optional subtitles in English or Esperanto.
• NEW Audio commentary by David J. Schow. The author of The Outer Limits: The Official Companion, covering Leslie Stevens’s best-known work, focuses mostly on biographies of the participants in Incubus and the history of its production (there’s some amusing detail on the “decoy script” devised to hide from location owners the fact that they were hosting a horror movie). There is little in the way of critical assessment, and the sound quality is occasionally shaky, but it is a useful complement from an outsider to the other commentaries by the filmmakers.
• Audio commentary by William Shatner. Unsurprisingly, Shatner’s commentary is based on his recollections of making Incubus, including the revelation that Stevens even insisted that on-set conversation be conducted in Esperanto. One or two of the star’s anecdotes should perhaps be taken with a pinch of salt. This was recorded for the 2001 release.
• Audio commentary by Anthony Taylor, Conrad L. Hall and William Fraker. Also prepared for the 2001 release, this brings together the producer, the cinematographer and one of the camera operators, and is the most interesting of the three commentaries in highlighting aspects of the movie you might not have noticed.
• NEW Words and Worlds: Incubus and Esperanto in Cinema. The comics-artist-turned-film-writer Stephen Bissette first provides an introduction to Esperanto, and then looks at constructed languages in literature generally (such as the ape language Edgar Rice Burroughs created for his Tarzan series), before turning to film. He’s especially interesting on Angoroj, the Esperanto predecessor of Incubus.
• NEW Internacia Lingvo: A History of Esperanto. This is an engaging, well-illustrated talk by Esther Schor, a professor of English at Princeton and author of Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language.
• An Interview with the Makers of Incubus. This interview from 2001 has David J. Schow talking to Anthony Taylor, Conrad L. Hall and William Fraker, and inevitably covers some of the same ground as their other contributions.
• Isolated score track. Always a nice feature to have, this provides the visuals and music of Incubus without the spoken dialogue (but with English subtitles).
• Video trailer. This rather optimistically compares Incubus to The Blair Witch Project (1999) and The Night of the Living Dead (1968).
• Reversible sleeve featuring newly commissioned artwork by Richard Wells.
• Illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Frank Collins and Jason Kruppa.

Cast & Crew

writer & director: Leslie Stevens.
starring: William Shatner, Allyson Ames, Eloise Hardt, Robert Fortier, Ann Atmar & Milos Milos.