Esperanto fascinates me, as it was something created per a noble intent, only to completely fail at what it hopes to achieve. Just trying to create a universal language is a goal with a built-in guarantee of failure to be widely adopted. It wouldn’t even be that well understood by the speakers of any of those other languages, as each person would glean just a few words, but not enough to result in full comprehension. And it, naturally, could not have elements of every language around the world, and Esperanto is from that doing that. It is very Euro-centric, which is telling.
1966’s Incubus is not the only movie filmed in the language, but this very obscure picture is the best known. The story is simple, and not unlike a fairy tale of the old, dark variety. That it is set in medieval times is appropriate for such a parable, and the visual style akin to The Seventh Seal serves the material well.
Alysson Ames a succubus, and not an incubus. She’s a sex demon who has tired of taking the souls of already corrupted men. She tells sister, and fellow incubus, Eloise Hardt, that she wants the challenge of corrupting a saint. “Then I would be the Beast God’s best daughter.” I propose we change the name of the holiday Father’s Day to Beast God’s Day.
Anything has to be better than the guy we see her kill at the start of the picture. She’s find him trying to drink from a well that he discovers is salt water. In a moment that feels part and parcel of the folk horror genre, she asks him what he name is, as if she is bereft of nomenclature and he has to give her one. The drunk whines he can’t even remember his own name. Still, she seduces him, luring him out to the sea, where she drowns him. She builds a weird sand castle over his remains, a structure that looks like if Antonio Gaudi worked in the form. One of the guys’ hands is sticking up through the sand, which you rarely see in children’s sand castles, but now I want to buy a prop hand and do just that.
Looking for a saint, she first seeks candidates the most unlikely to be pure of spirit, and those are designated holy men. Instead, Shatner’s wounded soldier is far more promising. For one thing, the well water that was salty to the drunk tastes sweet to him, suggesting a person’s inner qualities are reflected in it tastes to them. His self-sacrifice puts him above other, lesser men. But Hardt warns her against this, which means women even back in the dark ages were keeping each other back from their career goals.
Hardt was right to be concerned, as Ames’s seduction of Shatner leaves his inherit goodness intact, while she finds herself experiencing true love. This is considered by Hardt to be a rape and so Hardt summons Satan at the site of a hanged man’s corpse at the abandoned gallows at night. The arrival of Satan is genuinely creepy in the same manner as some horror films of the silent era, except this one also makes the scariest fucking noise when he talks. No really, it is worth watching the movie just for this scene.
Satan then makes the titular creature rise from the mud. I was curious as to why Hardt couldn’t just do that herself and cut out the middleman. Then again, surely Satan must run on the most bureaucratically heavy of operations, so of course he would have to be involved. Afterwards, he probably mansplained to her how the procedure is done.
There is another fascinating scene I want to call out and that is an eclipse. Just like in the only total eclipse I have witnessed, the light takes on a strange quality and everything becomes quiet. I’m unsure as the symbolic importance of the eclipse, but the moment feels right. Really, it just gives Shatner a reason to walk her back to the road, giving her more time to seduce him.
The eclipse has also blinded Ann Atmar, who is Shatner’s sister. Already little used to any real purpose, she spends a ridiculous amount of time calling out the name of Shatner’s character, which is Marco. Feel free to yell out Pollo each time she does that but be prepared to give up before she does. Hardt will silence her, and we should all be grateful for that.
There is much here that is interesting though, like its rural setting, it moves at a leisurely pace. It is solidly folk horror, which such intriguing dialogue as “I feel an aching like the tides, the sun and moon moving together to become one.” It even feels a bit like modern films of that genre, with a shot of one character starting right-side up, until it follows them into a church, by which point the shot is upside-down. I couldn’t believe people were doing shit like that back, the kind of pointlessly showy camera movement which is in every other horror picture today.
Despite the seeming pointlessness of having a script written in Esperanto, that aspect of the production also helps to give Incubus the quality of something unusual and creepy. I know just enough Spanish and French to recognize enough works to skew the dialogue in a manner that makes it feel like something from a parallel Earth, where those languages developed differently. Even the opening credits are in the language, which are overlaid atop illustrations of Satanic imagery, become a tad creepier for the same reason. That strangest thing is this picture has one of the best performances I have seen from Shatner, possibly having to dial it back because his lines had to be learned phonetically. Maybe that has been the problem with his body of work—he needed to make more films in Esperanto.
Dir: Leslie Stevens
Starring William Shatner, Allyson Ames, Eloise Hardt
Watched on Arrow Video blu-ray