Incubus (1966) Pure Kitsch by way of Bergman?

Incubus’s credentials seem to be pure kitsch. A forgotten independent horror film starring Captain Kirk and the guy who killed Mickey Rooney’s wife, shot in a made-up language. Job’s a good ‘un. Get Mystery Science Theater 3000 on the phone. 

But as Arrow’s excellent new Blu-Ray release reveals, there’s much more to this modest effort from the creator of The Outer Limits than just a potential running commentary. For one thing, its presence as only the second film ever filmed in Esperanto. The world’s most widely spoken constructed language, its creator, L.L. Zamenhof, never intended for it to be used in art or culture. Instead, it was meant to be a secondary language for international communication, a way to break down the barriers imposed by differing languages. For Leslie Stevens and producer Anthony M. Taylor, however, the presence of such hopeful grammar was an opportunity to make a truly memorable horror film. 

And memorable the Esperanto is, though perhaps not for the right reasons. Given only ten days to learn their lines phonetically, and then ten days to shoot the film, the actors have, to the ears of Esperanto speakers, appalling pronunciation. Most lean into a quasi-Swedish diction, while Shatner attempts to inflect his readings with the usual bag of Shatnerisms to the point of being incomprehensible at points. All seem profoundly ill at ease with the meanings of their words. It’s this fumbling that has probably led to Incubus’s legendary reputation for laughable quality, a reputation not helped by its thirty-year disappearance from circulation.

That reputation is a real pity, because not only is it a profoundly beautiful film visually, there is real atmosphere in its battle between ultimate good and ultimate evil. The plot in brief; a mystical village with a rejuvenating spring is the home to succubae who lure the vain or vile to their doom. One of these, Kia, is bored of her task and demands a true challenge- seducing a pure soul. This is when she finds in wounded soldier Marc, who soon falls passionately for her seductive presence. But when he takes her to the local chapel, the purity of love repulses her and she and her sister plan revenge in the worst way possible; by summoning the Incubus…

I mentioned earlier that certain performers pronounce their Esperanto as they would Swedish, but there is something of Bergman in Incubus’s makeup. The resemblance is most obvious visually, with Conrad “American Beauty” Hall’s gorgeous black and white photography (remarkably clear even in the somewhat scratched restored print) evoking both the sun-dappled peace of Wild Strawberries and the wild nature of Fårö that would dominate Bergman’s cinema from Persona onwards. The Persona influence goes deeper, for there’s also a striking image where Kia and her sister Amael talk of the former’s dissatisfaction with her lot, their faces framed by the other’s shoulders in a manner that recalls Bergman’s psychological horror opus. It also neatly details the closeness between Kia and Amael, sisters of blood and dark purpose, mirrored by Marc and his uncomfortably close relationship with his sister Arndis.

And while the conversations around Good and Evil are far more simplistic than anything by Sweden’s greatest contribution to cinema, Incubus is nevertheless invested in similar anxieties of faith. Here, priests are corrupted souls, fat and lazy, while the true goodness of spirit is held in the heart of one who does not question his own morality. Instead, he simply acts as he feels right with a lack of fear that lets him make immense sacrifices. Kia cannot comprehend why any soul would make sacrifices for another, and her lack of understanding is what drives her from her initial goal. Even when Marc is presented with the most atrocious crimes against him and those he loves, he never succumbs to despair, while Kia’s appetite for corruption through misery gradually turns her inside out. 

It’s Shatner’s performance as Marc that, oddly, stays in the mind long after the film has ended. He’s an actor who can jump from exceptional to appalling all in the space of a scene, as his time in Star Trek proves, but what makes him watchable is the way he inflects a word unexpectedly, gestures using his arms as if to a wider future, smiles wistfully at something only he knows. It can feel incredibly rote if you’ve seen enough of his work (and believe me, I’ve seen TOS more times than I care to mention), but you get the sense that in Incubus, he’s at least trying to project what might be going on inside Marc’s mind, the complexity of his torment. Milos Milos deserves a mention, too, for his performance as the titular demon. The owner of some incredibly expressive eyes and a repulsively mobile tongue, he effortlessly communicates abominable atrocity with minimal dialogue. 

Arrow’s new Blu-Ray benefits from Le Chat Qui Fume’s 4K restoration of the only extant 35mm print, which goes some way to restoring the beautiful cinematography to its original glory. However, the burned in French subtitles are still visible in the full screen presentation and I would imagine that they would be even more so in the alternate 1.37:1 presentation of the film. It doesn’t distract from the film excessively but it is surprising to see them in a boutique restoration. A sad comment on the limits of film preservation, where in this era of seemingly unlimited films to be restored there are challenges beyond even the most sophisticated laboratories. 

The extras on the disc are uniformly excellent. There’s “Internacia Lingvo: A History of Esperanto”, an informative twenty-minute interview with a biographer of L. L. Zamenhof (the creator of Esperanto) that gives wonderful context to the film and reveals its love/hate relationship in the Esperanto community. Included too is an archival interview by David J. Schow (who contributes a commentary track to the disc) with Hall, producer Taylor and camera operator William Fraker, where the insights of the three creatives are somewhat undercut by the featurette’s choppy editing, giving the video a somewhat tense feel when it should be celebratory. The icing on the cake, though, is a mammoth 45-minute interview/essay, “Words and Worlds”, talking about the history of Esperanto in film. If you’re as intrigued by the history of Esperanto on film as I am, it is absolutely worth your time.

Incubus may not be that mythical unicorn of resurrected masterpieces; the plot has some curious developments that stretch credibility and move into deeply uncomfortable territory at points. It is, however, a strangely beguiling and always fascinating little work made with uncommon intelligence and real beauty. Absolutely more than just fodder for a show where a man is forced to watch B-Movies.

ETHAN’S ARCHIVE – INCUBUS