Incubus
The commune of Nomen Tuum, a peaceful haven set in summer meadows, near the coast of rocks and golden sands and a well reputed to have healing powers, drawing to it the infirm seeking healing and the vain seeking to become more beautiful, but also a hunting ground for demons who take the form of young women, seeking tainted souls and leading their victims to the waters where they drown them in the name of the God of Darkness.
But would not a clean soul be a better offering than one already corrupted? A young man, a soldier whose dreams are haunted by thunder and battles, Marc, arrives with his sister Arndis seeking the healing powers of the water; seeing him as a suitable candidate, the succubus Kia sets about seducing him, but his steadfast purity is a challenge to her, and he will change her as much as changes him, forcing her to summon an Incubus to force him into an act which will damn him.
In the broad and often strange church of horror, there can be few films as outlandish as Incubus (Inkubo) written and directed by Leslie Stevens, creator of The Outer Limits, starring Canadian theatre actor William Shatner as Marc, Allyson Ames as Kia and Ann Atmar as Arndis, apparently set in no specific time and place though shot around Big Sur Beach and the historic Mission San Antonio de Padua in California entirely in the constructed language of Esperanto which the cast learned phonetically, with a soundtrack by The Invaders‘ Dominic Frontiere.
Planned for release in late 1966, Milos Milos who played the titular demon murdered his girlfriend then killed himself at the start of that year, further compromising what would already be a difficult proposition for a distributor, relegating the film to obscurity such that it was believed lost until a copy with hard-burned French subtitles was discovered in 1996, allowing Arrow to restore that surviving 35mm print for their Blu-ray edition of what is now regarded as an early work in what has been called “California Gothic.”
The script wordy, the phrasing of the dialogue formal to the point of feeling unnatural, possibly as a consequence of having been translated into an artificial language then presented as English subtitles, the language places Incubus at an otherworldy remove, almost excusing the cavalier attitude towards continuity of day and night scenes and the strange behaviour of the more human characters, the awkward performances exacerbated by working in an unfamiliar dialect, yet it remains interesting precisely for how strange it is.
Shatner having described it as “the most unusual film in which I’ve ever been involved,” though his later horror The Devil’s Rain is probably the superior film, Arrow’s new edition carries the film in two picture ratios, one excising the majority of the French subtitles, along with new and archive commentaries from Shatner, producer Anthony Taylor, cinematographer Conrad L Hall, camera operator William Fraker and genre historian David J Schow and two explorations from Stephen Bissette and Esther Schor of Esperanto in this and others works ranging from Burroughs and Lovecraft to Gattaca.
Incubus will be released on Blu-ray by Arrow Films on Monday 13th January
