Incubus (1966)

Good movie but grossly overrated

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

"Incubus" is a true oddity. I was surprised to discover it is neither the first nor the last film to be performed entirely in Esperanto but it is, doubtlessly, the most famous. It would be a very strange film, even without being filmed in an obscure, invented language. The decision to shot the story in Esperanto just furthers the movie's otherworldly atmosphere. "Incubus" feels like a fable from another place.The story is simplistic, playing almost like a Greek myth. On an island there is a monastery and, near-by, a spring with supposed healing properties that is also supposed to make whoever drinks from it beautiful. This attribute attracts a lot of vain, morally bankrupt people, so the island is also a gathering ground for demons. Succubi lure impure, corrupt men into the ocean and then drown them, holding their heads under the water. Kia, a young, proud succubus, longs to seduce a holy, pure man. Despite the objection of her fellow succubi, Kia's quest leads her to Marco, a war veteran living with his sister near the spring, hoping to heal his lingering war wounds. Marco immediately falls for Kia but can't bring himself to consummate the relationship. His pure love infects her, prompting the other succubi to unleash an incubus on the island in revenge. There's a solar eclipse, a blind girl wandering through the forest, a lot of religious imagery, and a savage goat attack.The movie feels very much like a 1960s art film. Certain shots recall both Bergman or early Polanski. When the succubus is brought to the chapel, when her evil soul is "raped by goodness," we get a lot of crash zooms on the religious icons, followed by a shifting, upside down shot of her running off. Early on, we get a drowning man's perspective, the camera shooting up through the water. Seeing Shatner bring his usual stilted style to Esperanto can be as exactly hilarious as you'd imagine. However, the movie is legitimately eerie and creepy at times. A dusty wind seems to being blowing at all hours on the island. The sequence were the Incubus is summoned is especially effective. A demon, his wings wide and huge, stands in an abandoned building, silhouetted in the shadows, fog blowing all around him. The ground shakes as the Incubus emerges from the dirt and mud. The film's latter half is shot entirely at night in deep, foreboding darkness. Even on DVD, it's sometimes hard to see what is happening. The climatic goat attack sounds absurd on paper but, in practice, it feels almost sincerely sacrilegious. The sparse score serves the otherworldly feel.The film was followed by a lot of bad luck. Two actors committed suicide, but not before one murdered Mickey Rooney's wife. Another actress had her child kidnapped and murdered. The production company went bankrupt and the film was lost for many years. The only existing print was found playing in Paris as a midnight movie. The French subtitles were burnt on the print which is why the DVD's English subtitles are so big and black, obscuring half of the screen at times. The DVD includes a sparse, frequently quiet, hilarious, melodramatic, no doubt lie filled audio commentary from William Shatner, a must-listen for fans of the actor's unique style. At only 75 minutes, "Incubus" is a quick watch and, considering how odd and unforgettable the film is, well worth your time.

Pretension is arranging the surface perception of being deep without actually being deep. That's why 'Last Year at Marienbad' is not pretentious (It's the real deal). And it's why 'Incubus' is pretentious. It shoehorned full of 'poetic' hyperbole ...foisting wall-to-wall pap on viewers in case they might miss it. Poetics are something a filmmaker stumbles across along a structural path. Half-hearted poetics decimate the structure here. There isn't a single gambit, or any stakes here that concern a viewer.If you'd seen this as a kid, it would have done an end-run around your growing adult taste, and bought your affection with some deliriously well-crafted visuals for a horror movie. The effort behind the camera is very accomplished, and suggests a careful study of old noirs. Really nice work. They can't seem to decide on what night looks like; but day for night looks better here than it ever did in noir.Then there's the horrid acting and that whole Esperanto thing.

I wouldn't call this film awful, compared, say, to a three hour Kevin Costner extravaganza or to any Ben Affleck rubbish you'd care to name. But it is pretentious, silly, and weird. Many of the comments above start with the decision of the screenplay's author to do it all in Esperanto. Must have seemed like a good idea at the time, but for me, the main effect was to persuade most of the cast to memorize and almost chant their lines rather than learn, internalize, and act them. Strangely, Shatner is the only member of the cast who tries to approach the dialog professionally, as if it were actually a dramatic role he's doing, with lines that have a real meaning, and not just something he's reciting for SAG scale.The thing that impressed me most about the film, apart from how good Marc's sister looked partially undressed, was the way the story is heavily imbued with Christian values. This influence appeared now and then in the old Outer Limits shows, but it's extremely rare to find such values in anybody's mainstream cinema, and even rarer in films like this one with pretensions to Bergmanesque artistry.Bottom line: rent it from Netflix for the oddity of it all, but don't take it seriously.And BTW, if Marc couldn't really kill the Incubus, how does the goat manage to kill Amael?

"Incubus" is a very strange movie to be sure – it's unique because it is the only film ever shot in the "universal language", Esperanto. It may be worth it for some viewers to see the film simply because it has camp-master William Shatner speaking his lines in this never-land language. But not for me. From the very first moments of the film you can tell what you're looking at – a good photographer with a bunch of amateur actors and an overambitious director gathered on the beaches of Big Sur in a desperate attempt to capture some of the magic of Ingmar Bergman's films "The Seventh Seal" and "Hour of the Wolf" and apply that magic to a straight-up horror film in the occult vein.The story is very confusing despite being very simple, due to the cryptic dialog and ineffective direction. I've seen it twice now so this is what I have been able to piece together – Shatner is playing a guy who is some kind of idyllic woodsman who lives with his sister in a cabin. A female devil worshipper sees him somewhere and gets a crush on him so she decides to corrupt him and make him a Satanist too, which her sister discourages. Soon Shatner is following the evil woman across a lovingly photographed wasteland, back to the beach again, and eventually he is involved in a confrontation with the "Incubus" (a male version of a Succubus, for those not in the know… this movie won't tell you so I might as well).The "Incubus" is literally a goat that someone put on top of Shatner that kicks him a bit and then disappears. Outside of some interesting but unoriginal photographic effects there really is nothing happening in this movie. Shatner's character completely forgets about the sister character, who has been blinded by a solar eclipse and spends most of the movie wandering around. There's no scares whatsoever. Maybe this movie appeals to people who like surrealist cinema. Usually I don't like that kind of thing anyway so I couldn't tell you if this is a good or a bad example of that school of cinema. My guess is that it's bad, and it's certainly bad from my perspective as someone who expects at least a minimum of character development and plot in a film.However the music is interesting and the photography is great. This is a good movie to watch if you were curious how to distinguish directing from photography because this is a very poorly directed but well photographed film. Other than that and the fact that it has Esperanto dialog there's nothing to distinguish it or make it memorable.By the way, I was able to see it this time in a 35mm presentation in the theater thanks to the producer Anthony Taylor who has a nice print and lives in Southern California.