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Incubus — 4K

by Glenn Erickson Dec 28, 2024

One of the strangest American films of the ’60s is Leslie Stevens’ occult thriller starring William Shatner — who speaks all his dialogue in Esperanto. A ‘once upon a time’ country has a healing well, but its forest and beaches are overrun by female demons that harvest wicked souls through seduction and murder. The weirdness is amplified by Conrad Hall’s cinematography and the eerie music of Dominic Frontiere. The once-obscure film was scanned in 4K from the only surviving projection print.


Incubus 4K
4K Ultra HD
Arrow Video
1966 / B&W / 1:85 widescreen / 78 min. / Street Date January 14, 2024 / Available from Arrow USA / 49.95
Starring: William Shatner, Allyson Ames, Eloise Hardt, Robert Fortier, Ann Atmar, Milos Milos, Paolo Cossa.
Cinematography: Conrad Hall
Assistant Camera: Jordan Cronenweth
Camera Operator: William A. Fraker
Main titles: Wayne Fitzgerald
Film Editors: Richard K. Brockway, Verna Fields
Original Music: Dominic Frontiere
Associate producer: Elaine Michea
Produced by Anthony M. Taylor
Written and Directed by
Leslie Stevens

All of us fans of fantastic film kept mental lists of ‘mystery’ films we wanted to see, titles alluded to in the pages of Famous Monsters and Castle of Frankenstein but all but impossible to see. We’d stay up to see ragged prints of goodies like  Mill of the Stone Women, not knowing if we’d seen a complete version; research sources weren’t comprehensive and there was of course no Internet and no IMDB. Little was known about shows like  Lemora and  The Mask — who made them?  Would we ever see  Dementia or  Malpertuis.  If we did, would we find out they weren’t worth the wait?

That frustration applied to almost all of the feature output of Leslie Stevens, whose name was known and respected from the great TV show  The Outer Limits. A genuine Wild Card writer-director — and definite Wild Card in his personal life as well — Stevens racked up solid writing credits before writing, producing and directing two eccentric pictures in the early 1960s. Considered all but lost for nearly 50 years, the notorious  Private Property was made available only through the efforts of film producer Dennis Bartok. We got to see the unusual  Hero’s Island only because MGM was releasing many obscure titles on its line of burn-on-demand DVDs.

When The Outer Limits came to an end, its creators went their separate ways, writing, producting and directing one-off projects. Joseph Stefano made a TV pilot with Martin Landau, that ended as a TV movie,  The Ghost of Sierra de Cobre. Leslie Stevens tried independent film production again, but this time going really weird. Everything about Stevens’  Incubus is haunted and strange, from the way it was filmed to the fates of its actors. It had a release in France, but saw few screenings in the U.S., and its film elements were left abandoned for years. When Leslie Stevens passed away in 1998, he may have believed that Incubus would be lost for all time.

 

No crocodiles in Nomen Tuum, but plenty of allegories.
 

Leslie Stevens sets his symbolic story in Nomen Tuum, an undefined seaside land under siege by occult spirits. Marc (William Shatner) returns home from war, hoping to resume a happy existence with his sister Arndis (Ann Atmar). A well called the Deer Well is believed to have healing power. But evil forces are afoot in the form of a pair of succubi, whose Earthly mission is to seduce corrupt men and harvest their souls for The Devil. The ambitious phantom Kia (Allyson Ames) targets Marc and makes the mistake of falling in love with him. In retribution, her superior Amael (Eloise Hart) dispatches a male demon called an Incubus (Milos Milos, aka Milosevicz) to attack the innocent Arndis. By provoking the virtuous Marc to a vengeful rage, the demons hope to make him ‘qualify’ as one of the damned.

Stevens made his quasi-horror movie unique, all right: the entire film is presented and performed in Esperanto, the invented romance-based language promoted by the United Nations as a possible One-World universal tongue. The main titles are written in Esperanto as well. Commonsense film marketing logic indicates that producers need to make their movies accessible to the widest range of audiences;

 

Purposely abstract.
 

Stevens must have been entranced by the exotic appeal of foreign movies, and we think part of that attraction was for the added endistancing effect of reading subtitles, and to create dramatic effects closer to abstract theater. On a theater stage, an experimental dramatist can do anything; an abstract style makes this kind of Anything Goes drama acceptable. Stevens works to create the same effect on film through production choices: location, costumes, and especially the cinematographic texture.

That’s where The Outer Limits comes in. In addition to that TV shows’ episodes concerned with literal Sci-fi threats — monsters, warriors from the future, etc. — Stevens & Stefano detoured as often as they could into more esoteric, abstract stories, edging into Art Film territory. The show generated at least one episode that was abstract to the point of total confusion.

Also adding to The Outer Limits’ allegorical texture was its distinctive music and camerawork — which Leslie Stevens channeled directly into Incubus. Composer Dominic Frontiere’s eerie soundtrack music for Incubus appears to be assembled from Outer Limits cues. Conrad Hall’s cinematography continues his expressive style from the TV show. In the forest, lush low contrast images are backlit with gauze filters, adding a soft-focus glow around the edges.

The sense of deja-vu is striking. For viewers that like the ‘atmospherics’ of The Outer Limits, and would like to see it applied to a macabre tale of Good vs. Evil, Incubus is just the ticket. The feature even uses a narrated introduction that reminds us of the ‘Control Voice.’

Stevens took Conrad Hall’s crew to the Big Sur locales to create an artsy horror item. It plays like a Satanic passion play as envisioned by Ingmar Bergman. There are many introspective closeups in the Bergman style. Thanks to the soft overcast light in Big Sur, the film’s surface texture is very much like Sven Nykvist’s work for the Swedish director. One angle even approximates a graphic motif from Bergman’s  Persona. Allyson Ames’ Kia resembles Liv Ullmann, and she’s costumed like Ullmann too.

 

How to make a movie that exhibitors won’t buy.
 

Prospective distributors may have rejected Stevens’ Incubus because it fell into no marketable pigeonhole. It’s not suitable for children, so it can’t go out as a normal horror item. Art theaters generate good reviews, but only a few attractions make money. It’s too tame for an adult theaters, which tend to stick to their own product pipeline. How many screenings ended with Stevens being asked, ‘People won’t sit through this …. why didn’t you film it in English?  Can you dub it?’

Everyone says they want something different. In hindsight it is easy to belittle Leslie Stevens’ effort to snag Hollywood’s elusive Brass Ring. But Incubus is a unique horror film. Interesting things can happen when a filmmaker takes chances.

Actors like to take chances too, and Stevens was able to attract motivated talent ready and eager to commit themselves to his occult fantasy. His one name performer William Shatner should already have been commended for his bold career move (and a great performance) starring in Roger Corman’s daring  The Intruder. Shatner works hard to make ‘Marc’ a relatable hero.

 

The show’s gender politics aren’t exactly progressive. In Stevens’ demonic setup, powerful, sexually aggressive females are naturally associated with Evil. The succubi have human qualities, like curiosity, but they’re no creampuffs – – they drown hapless mortals for sport. Substantial interest is generated by Allyson Ames’ Kia, a sort of succubus in training.  Hell’s equivalent of  a guardian angel, 2nd class uses her foot to hold a victim’s head underwater, while wondering why her seductive murders are necessary. Her first male victim is just a fool, but our hero Marc is too good to be suspicious of Evil until it is too late.

The traditional line is that any affair with a beautiful stranger is practically Puritan. But the stylized performances draw us into this story of an innocent mankind (what?) holding its own against an unending siege of demonic agents. Unpredictable yet familiar, Incubus has as one of its climaxes a frightening rape scene. The suffering of Marc’s innocent sister demands our sympathy. The editing of the rape is a bit choppy, suggesting that Stevens may have been induced to remove a shot or two.

Incubus was never distributed in America, but the interesting Esperanto angle attracted substancial publicity. Leslie Stevens was already known as an unpredictable talent, but some of the buzz around him was negative. The release of Private Property had been condemned by the Catholics and refused a Production Code Seal, and was shunned as a vaguely dirty movie. Journalists would note the success of The Outer Limits and then mention his ‘weird Esperanto movie’ as a kicker.

But few people could actually see the movie. Incubus soon became a forgotten industry rumor, only mentioned in passing, or in books like Psychotronic Movies. When Leslie Stevens made a film for Cannon Films in the late ’80s, his daughter worked with us at the Los Angeles office for a while. When we were tipped to her identity, the first thing Todd Stribich and I asked her was if her father had a print of the movie. She had never seen it herself, and was terribly curious about it too.

 

In 1999 Video Watchdog magazine (#53) offered articles on the struggle to revive Incubus, an essay by David J. Schow and an interview with producer Anthony M. Taylor by Tom Weaver. We learned that Taylor had tried to revise the film in 1968 by adding a color sequence with nudity. He brought back a couple of the actors and hired a body double for Allyson Ames. That jibes with the IMDB claiming that Ray Dennis Steckler and Carolyn Brandt helped on the shoot.

Taylor then left the original Incubus negative and the few prints in the film vault at the Hollywood lab Consolidated Film Industries — and then had waited a full 27 years before going back to claim them. It’s no wonder at all that everything would be long gone.

A lone positive projection print was eventually located in France, and accessed for video transfers. But the print had been subtitled in French: covering those subs required that large, distracting black boxes be superimposed to cover them.

Always mentioned in conjunction with Incubus are the strange futures that befell some of the largely unknown cast. Shatner immediately stepped into history on the bridge of the Enterprise. others in the group had fates as strange as the movie itself. Allyson Ames made just a few more films. The intriguing Ann Atmar took her own life less than a year later. The Incubus himself, Milos Milos ( The Russians Are Coming The Russians Are Coming) died in a notorious murder-suicide, also in 1966, with Mickey Rooney’s fifth wife.

 


 

Arrow Video USA’s 4K Ultra HD of Incubus is billed as a restoration by Le Chat Qui Fume from the last surviving 35mm print. The disc has been encoded at full 4K specs with Dolby Vision, HDR10 compatible. The image looks very good, albeit with an attenuated contrast range.

A big improvement is the handling of the subtitle problem. The source is the same lone French release print as seen before, which has burned-in French subs. But the 1:85 scan crops out most of the subtitles: only subs with two stacked lines of text peek up into the widescreen framing. Therefore no black boxes are superimposed to cover the old subs. The new removable English subs float normally on the image.

Are there still thousands of people who know and read Esperanto?  An added feature, the film has been subtitled in Esperanto as well.

The drawback is that the source is still that one surviving print. The remastering job is excellent and the picture looks very clean. The show still has a rather high-contrast look … the image is detailed, but not delicate. The audio source is the old optical track, and even with a good clean-up, can sound a little flat here and there.

It’s terrific that Incubus has been given this attention. But is it really a good candidate for a 4K disc presentation?  As with last month’s  Scarface ’32 from Criterion, the 4K format seems like overkill on a show for which perfect, first generation picture and sound are no longer available.

Arrow USA’s 4K edition of Incubus does not contain an alternate disc in standard Blu-ray HD. A  second Blu-ray package is being released in parallel.

 

The ‘last, lost’ episode of The Outer Limits?
 

Our check disc gives us access to Arrow’s video extras, but not to the deluxe packaging or the illustrated insert booklet with its essays. The video extras are a tall stack of older items, topped by a new commentary by author and Leslie Stevens biographer David J. Schow. The excellent track answers most every conceivable question about the film, with excerpts from Stevens’ screenplay to documented explanations of the film’s intentions, the backgrounds of the actors, the entire story with the use of Esperanto. Schow includes a full rundown on Stevens, and a detailed story of how the producer’s film was misplaced/lost/destroyed by CFI. Everything about the movie turns into an unusual story.

Some of the video extras were produced for an older Severin disc, and a couple of new items (an analysis by Stephen Bissette) and an Esperanto piece, are new. We’re glad that Arrow was able to include an extra from the old Fox Lorber DVD, David Schow’s interview video with producer Taylor and the acclaimed cameramen Conrad Hall and William Fraker, who discuss Incubus with respect.

An additional flat full frame transfer makes the film français-friendly as well, using those ‘original’ French subs.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson


Incubus 4K
4K Ultra HD rates:
Movie: ++
Video: Good
Sound: Good
Audio Commentaries:
By David J. Schow (new)
By William Shatner
With Anthony Taylor, cinematographer Conrad Hall and camera operator William Fraker
Featurettes:
Words and Worlds: Incubus and Esperanto in Cinema a new talk by Stephen Bissette
Internacia Lingvo: A History of Esperanto a talk by Esperanto authority Esther Schor
An Interview with the Makers of Incubus a discussion by David J. Schow with Taylor, Hall and Fraker
Alternate flat (1.37) feature presentation (SP only)
Video trailer
Reversible sleeve with new artwork by Richard Wells
Illustrated collector’s booklet featuring essays by Frank Collins and Jason Kruppa.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English, Esperanto (feature only)
Packaging: One 4K Ultra HD in Keep case
Reviewed:
December 26, 2024
(7250incu)
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Text © Copyright 2024 Glenn Erickson

About Glenn Erickson

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Glenn Erickson left a small town for UCLA film school, where his spooky student movie about a haunted window landed him a job on the CLOSE ENCOUNTERS effects crew. He’s a writer and a film editor experienced in features, TV commercials, Cannon movie trailers, special montages and disc docus. But he’s most proud of finding the lost ending for a famous film noir, that few people knew was missing. Glenn is grateful for Trailers From Hell’s generous offer of a guest reviewing haven for CineSavant.

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Chas Speed

I agree that this does seem like an unlikely choice for 4K because of finding original prints. It is certainly an odd choice, but it’s an interesting movie. I had not heard of this release before seeing your review.

Joe Dante

When using CFI for lab work in the 70s we all figured CFI stood for Can’t Find It.

David

> Are there still thousands of people who know and read Esperanto?

The only real research done on this estimated around two million fluent speakers (not bad for a language that started with… one).

Esperanto is much easier to learn than other languages because of its very regular and streamlined grammar. In the US, start with http://www.esperanto-usa.org for info.

Philip David Morgan

‘Are there still thousands of people who know and read Esperanto?’ Jes, ja — indeed, the language is in use by speakers in some 100 countries, including these (United?) States, which actually has its own national organization devoted to the language (Esperanto-USA). The Internet has certainly made it considerably accessible with online courses (including one for English speakers on Duolingo). There are also Esperanto streamers on Twitch (I mod for two of them). The problem with «Incubus» isn’t so much choosing Esperanto but rather that the producers said no to any and all help making sure it was correctly handled. That said, better cinema in Zamenhof’s language is possible.

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