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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
In the obscure '60s art-horror film, William Shatner is terrorized by murderous sea creatures. What happened off-screen was worse.
May 3, 2000 | The story of "Incubus," the 1960s cult horror film, is bad enough. It's about a beautiful succubus who lures corrupt men to the sea, where she steps on their heads -- and drowns them.
Finding that almost too easy, she decides to seduce a morally upright soldier. But they fall in love. Her succubus sister summons their leader, the Incubus, from his underground lair. He gets back at the soldier by violating his virginal sister and then tries to murder him.
And if that doesn't put the chill in your bones, it gets worse: "Incubus" stars William Shatner. And the whole thing is done in Esperanto.
"Incubus," directed by "The Outer Limits" creator Leslie Stevens, made a minor splash on the underground film scene right after its release in 1966. Few know, however, that the real-life story of the film and its aftermath rivals the on-screen horror. Murder, suicide and kidnapping, for a start. And the movie itself, decades later, seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth.
"Who knows if there's a curse or not," says Tony Taylor, the movies producer, "but a lot of stuff happened to a lot of people."
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"Incubus" is set in a small village during a lunar eclipse and shot in black and white, which gives it a timeless, otherworldly atmosphere. It was filmed by cinematographer Conrad Hall, who remembers the Big Sur, Calif., setting as "a windswept forest of eucalyptus trees with gnarled limbs that looked like monsters frowning down on you." (Hall, who won an Oscar for his work on "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," took home another in March for "American Beauty.")
"Incubus" is the only known film in which the characters speak entirely in Esperanto -- the made-up universal language created in 1887 by Ludovic Zamenhof using characteristics from a variety of the world's languages. (The film was subtitled in English.) "I never liked the idea of seeing World War II movies where the Germans and Japanese characters spoke English," explains Taylor. "I thought the idea of having devils and demons speak English was a similar thing. Also, we thought it would help get us into the art houses."
The thought of watching a stiff, pre-"Star Trek" Shatner speaking a fake language with spooky music in the background may sound like hell on earth. In fact, the film is engaging, and has more in common with Ingmar Bergman than Wes Craven.
Hall's inventive cinematography, the Esperanto dialogue and the rough-hewn setting work together to give the film a timeless, otherworldly quality. (The village where it's set is called Nomen Tuum -- "An Unknown Time.")
Its brief but thorough examination of purity and corruption is also clever, particularly when the young succubus is complaining to her older sister that shed prefer more challenging work. "I'm weary of luring evil, ugly souls into the pit," she says. "They'll find their own way down to the sewers of hell."
The older sister replies, deadpan, "When wheat ripens, someone has to harvest it."
Then there's the scene where the Incubus tries to lure his wayward succubus away from Shatner at the entrance to the church. When she makes the sign of the cross in defense, the Incubus suddenly becomes an extraordinarily ugly, screaming black goat who commences to ravish her.
But nothing audiences saw on the screen approached the horrors that would be visited on its makers in the time after its release.
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The film was invited to several film festivals, which gave it rave reviews. The program for the 1966 San Francisco Film Festival of that year describes the scene in which the Incubus emerges from underground as "one of the most splendid pieces of horror since the late James Whale conceived the idea of Frankensteins electronic monster." But all the producers could notice were the gruesome fates that befell their comrades.
The Incubus -- a lumbering, craggy-faced giant -- was played by Milos Milos, a buff actor from Belgrade, Yugoslavia, who'd spent some time as a stand-in for decadent French superstar Alain Delon. At the time, he was dating Barbara Ann Thompson Rooney, Mickey Rooneys estranged fifth wife. In 1966, Milos murdered her, and then shot himself.
In the film, Shatner's virginal sister, whom the Incubus violates, was played by Ann Atmar, a sometime girlie-magazine model. She committed suicide a few weeks after the film wrapped up.
A few years after the film was released, the daughter of the woman who played the elder sister succubus, Eloise Hardt, was kidnapped from her Los Angeles driveway and murdered. Her body was discovered a few weeks later in the Hollywood Hills.
