Dr. Strangefilm Case #007: Incubus

10.22.09 | Dr. Strangefilm | From the Files of Dr. Strangefilm...Print this Post

Last month one of my colleagues here at Movie FanFare posted an insightful and eloquent review of that succulent slice of "70s Satanic cinema, The Devil's Rain, starring a goat-headed Ernest Borgnine, a waxy-faced John Travolta, and some emotionless zombie wearing a William Shatner mask...oh, my mistake, that actually was William Shatner. The Devil's Rain certainly earned itself a listing in the annals of bad horror films, but readers might be surprised to find out that this wasn't the first time the once-and-future Captain Kirk found himself in mortal combat with the forces of darkness on the big screen.

In 1965 writer/director Leslie Stevens, best known as the creator of TV's The Outer Limits, cast the pre-Star Trek star as the lead of his bizarrely Bergmanesque and symbol-laden shocker Incubus, a tale of seductive succubi sisters and a heroic Shatner. "Sounds intriguing, Doc," you may be saying to yourself, "Why haven't I ever seen this in a theater or on my local late, late show?"  Well, there are several reasons that I'll be going into later, but the main one will suffice for now. You see..."INCUBUS ESTIS LA UNUA KAJ SEKVE FOR NUR USONA KINOFILMO ESTI FAR TUTE EN LA LINGVO DE ESPERANTO."

That, by the way, reads in English as "INCUBUS WAS THE FIRST AND SO FAR ONLY AMERICAN FEATURE FILM TO BE MADE ENTIRELY IN THE LANGUAGE OF ESPERANTO." And Esperanto, kiddies, is a language created in 1887  by Polish-born linguist and opthamologist (!) L.L. Zamenhof with the dream of it becoming a universal "second tongue" and fostering global understanding and cooperation (the word Esperanto translates as "one who hopes"). Why Stevens decided to shoot his meditation on temptation and evil in a language that would require subtitles, even in its country of origin (producer Anthony Taylor suggested they hoped it would get the low-budget work into American arthouse theaters), remains a mystery, but it does give Incubus a unique touch of strangeness.

The film opens in an indeterminate European coastal village (said scenic coast played by California's Big Sur region) sometime in an indeterminate past, where a local well's alleged healing powers bring a variety of visitors, including "the vain and the corrupt." A beautiful succubus named Kia (Allyson Ames, later to become Mrs. Stevens) is busy filling her daily quota of sending souls to Hell by luring a man to the seaside and stepping on his head to keep it under the waves, drowning him.  Unhappy with the quality of tainted victims she's bagging--or maybe with how long it takes to drown them--Kia talks to her older demonic sibling Amael (Eloise Hardt) about the possibility of claiming a pure one for a change. "Why waste our time herding swine?," she asks.  Hardt warns Ames that an untainted soul such as she seeks will infect her with that most mysterious and profound of  powers...love. These tidy Hallmark-style sayings are played out with the sisters standing in perpendicular profile to one another, in the style made famous by Ingmar Bergman (see The Silence and the later Persona), with the Esperanto dialogue and stark black-and-white camerawork adding to the film's bleakly Scandinavian feel.

An unconcerned Ames sets out to find her unsullied spirit, and whom does she spy coming out of a church but--you guessed it--T.J. Hooker himself, playing a wounded soldier named Marc and accompanied by his sister Arndis (Ann Atmar)? It doesn't take Ames, posing as innocent farm worker, long to ensnare her target with her feminine wiles, but just as big sis warned her, she soon finds herself falling victim to Shatner's wholesome feelings for her  (Hey, didn't the same thing happen to some hot alien chick every other week on TV?).  Now that Kia has been "defiled...by an act of love," she and Amael call upon their dark master--effectively and eerily depicted as a bat-winged behemoth--to bring forth their male counterpart, an incubus (Milos Milos) who will defile the innocent Arndis and force Marc to kill him for revenge, thus staining his soul.

All the befouling and damning culminates in a showdown back at the church between a bloodied Shatner and Ames and the incubus, who at one point turns into a goat and attempts to impale his erstwhile fellow demon with his horns (I think it's his horns. Although nothing graphic is depicted, the scene kinda implies bestiality but looks more like a petting zoo mishap). Does evil triumph? Does good prevail? Does Denny Crane get the final camera shot? Well, I'll only answer the last question; the last shot honor goes, naturally, to the goat.

Even without considering its soundtrack, Incubus stands as an oddball mix of the portentious and the pretentious, its dreamlike demeanor matching such early Euro-chillers as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Vampyr and its overly philosophical musings on the nature of evil and temptation feeling at times like a Sunday School drama. Still, Stevens crafted a moody depiction of Satanic terror that would later be utilized in such Hollywood hits as Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist. And given that the actors had to cope with dialogue in a language none of them were familiar with, they all gave effective performances (yes, Shatner, too).  The strangest aspect of this film, however, was yet to come.

Sometimes, enough on-set calamities or later tragedies will mark a movie as "cursed" (see The Conqueror or Poltergeist), and such was also the case with Incubus. Atmar, who played Shatner's sister, committed suicide shortly after shooting was finished, and the title actor, Milos Milos, killed girlfriend Barabra Ann Thompson Rooney, Mickey Rooney's estranged wife, before taking his own life in early 1966. A few years later, actress Hardt's daughter was kidnapped and murdered. Nearly all prints of the film were destroyed in a fire, and Stevens' production company went bankrupt a short time after (he would go on to work on such TV series as the original Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers with Gil Gerard before dying in 1998). In fact, the print that the DVD was made from turned up by chance in the archives of the Cinematheque Francaise in Paris, where it had been playing for years as a cult feature a la The Rocky Horror Picture Show.  The only main player aside from Shatner to emerge unscathed from the shadow of the incubus would seem to be cinematographer Conrad Hall, who would go on to win three Academy Awards for his work in such films as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and American Beauty.  As they say in Esperanto, "TRE STRANGA, EFEKTIVE (VERY STRANGE, INDEED)."