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INCUBUS |
INCUBUS on VHS and DVD!
PRIVATE PROPERTY (1961), Daystar's first feature film, was a stark little psychopathological fun-ride starring Warren Oates, Corey Allen, and Stevens' second wife, Kate Manx. The Catholic church rated it Condemned and Time Magazine said that it "carried the New Wave crashing into the heart of Hollywood." Produced on a shoestring, it won Daystar a million-dollar film deal from 20th Century-Fox, yet it has been unavailable since its initial and provocative first run. STONEY BURKE, a rodeo series starring Jack Lord, was the fundament of Daystar's ambitious plans to become the Quinn-Martin of its day; produced in 1962-63, the episodes are unavailable today except for privately film-chained videos representing about half the series' run. THE UNKNOWN, a dark, Gothic-Expressionist pilot heavily based on Clouzot's Les Diaboliques, was eventually re-edited and presented in altered form as an episode of Daystar's better-known series, THE OUTER LIMITS, under the Shakespearean title "The Forms of Things Unknown," in early 1964. The production of this surreal Joseph Stefano script fomented stress cracks in Daystar's relationship with ABC that eventually ripped THE OUTER LIMITS asunder. Having been maneuvered out of making his directing debut on THE UNKNOWN, Stefano wrote and directed another supernatural series pilot for CBS in 1966, THE HAUNTED, utilizing most elements of the Daystar crew and starring Martin Landau as psychic investigator Nelson Orion. It remains unavailable except for sporadic showings on Canadian television. MARRIAGE-GO-ROUND, a 20th Century-Fox production of Stevens' hit stage play, is not currently available on video or laserdisc. HERO'S ISLAND, produced in 1962 and starring Stevens' sometimes-silent partner, James Mason, occasionally shows on TNT. "(It was) a true art film," said Stevens, "because who in hell, in 1962, would want to see a movie about indentured servants in 1718?" But none of Daystar's "lost" productions remain as legendary as its final effort, 1965's INCUBUS (no relation to the subsequent 1982 movie based on the Ray Russell novel) -- yes, the one shot entirely in Esperanto. Yes, the one starring William Shatner. The one that had achieved cult classic status in France yet remained unavailable until its producer, Anthony Taylor, recovered what is believed to be the sole existing print of the film in 1998.
A good general rule of thumb for subdividing OUTER LIMITS episodes in terms of creative influence is that the "darker" shows, the more noirish and horrific ones, were the purvue of Joseph Stefano. Leslie Stevens, who grew up on science fiction pulps and maintained a constant interest in tying into the emergent New Age, was the technocrat, focused on the fantastic and speculative. In terms of the characters they wrote, Stevens handled most of the obsessed seekers while Stefano dealt with the mad dreamers. But when Stevens abandoned his beloved hardware to turn his attention toward the nightmare side, he melded the fever dreams so favored by his partner with his own ruminations on the good vs. evil archetype, and the result was INCUBUS -- a pitch-black, redemptionless scenario that tries to out-Gothic even Stefano's own THE UNKNOWN. Following cancellation of THE OUTER LIMITS, Daystar was within an inch of failing completely. "I was broke and out of it," Stevens said. "We hung together in morale and creativity long enough to turn out something, though." In partnership with Contempo III Productions in the person of Anthony Taylor, Stevens and company descended upon Big Sur on May 5th, 1965 for a two-week shoot.
Upstart succubus Kia, bored with harvesting the souls of the corrupt, plots the capture of a "noble soul." As she tells her sister Amael, "I want to find a saint and cut him down, corrupt him, crush him, put my foot on his holy neck and make him rave and howl and bleed and weep, then send him plunging down into the inferno! ... Then, I would be a demon. I would be the Beast God's best daughter!" Amael warns Kia that the power of love can derail her plans, but Kia sets her sights on Marc, an injured military man who has recently saved fellow soldiers from a fiery cataclysm, and has rejuvenated himself at the Deer Well. When Marc and Kia do fall in love, Amael declares that Kia has been "corrupted with good" and calls up the Incubus to avenge this "holy rape" by ravishing Marc's sister, Arndis, who dies as a result. Marc attacks the Incubus and is about to lose the fight when Amael advises the Incubus to let Marc kill him, so Marc will be "smeared with the blood of vengeance" and therefore suitable to be cast down. Marc stabs the Incubus and flees to a mission, having observed Kia's previous difficulty in crossing the threshold of the church. Amael revivifies the Incubus, who chases Marc down just as Kia confesses her love, and hence, her new allegiance to the God of Light. The Incubus ravages Kia, who is able to crawl into Marc's embrace inside the mission. Although they are both dying, they are together, and the Incubus raves on futilely outside, unable to enter.
The opening of INCUBUS immediately recalls "Forms": Olin, a corrupt man, drinks from the Deer Well to rejuvenate himself and tastes "salt," a pretty sure sign that he's about finished. Kia leads him to the sea with the promise of swimming naked and drowns him by holding his head under water with her foot. In "Forms," a corrupt man named Andre is poisoned by "a leaf from the Thanatos Tree" placed in his martini by his two mistresses; he suffers a similar watery death in the lake into which he has forced the women to march, fully clothed. (Olin is played by stalwart Stevens friend Robert Fortier, who appeared in two of the four OUTER LIMITS episodes written and directed by Stevens -- "Controlled Experiment" and "Production and Decay of Strange Particles." Stevens' then-wife, Allyson Ames, stars as Kia; she had appeared in PLEASE STAND BY, the OUTER LIMITS pilot later recut and retitled "The Galaxy Being," and in "Production/Decay" with Fortier. For genre fans, Ames is also briefly visible [and credited] in the 1962 time-killer THE PHANTOM PLANET. The Control Voice-style intro was read by Paolo Cossa, an Italian actor who, according to Taylor, "had quite a hangover the morning we recorded the narration; it really deepened his voice.") Both "Forms" and INCUBUS toy with the concept of resurrection -- in "Forms," Andre is brought back to life by a "time-tilter" only to be killed again for real, and in INCUBUS, the titular monster permits himself to be killed by Marc in order to achieve Marc's spiritual damnation, and is promptly re-infused with new life by Amael, who dies to accomplish this. Where Andre is the only true casualty of "Forms," by the closing credits of INCUBUS, all the players are dead, have died at least once, or are dying. A long speech by the two succubi helps emphasize that whether the people they victimize are good or evil is immaterial; it is their choice for one or the other which merely determines their value as the metaphysical version of a trophy kill. Again, except for the convenient emplacement of already-familiar good-evil imagery (ie., the bat-winged specter waiting just beyond the gateway to the Inferno), INCUBUS is amazingly non-judgmental in recommending one over the other, and the power of redemption (for Marc, for Kia) lies in their ability to love, not to choose a dogma or be wary of what today's mass cinema can only summarize inadequately as "the dark side of the Force." While the references to conventional religious archetypes is more pronounced in Stevens' screenplay, the film itself strips the God Vs. Satan stuff about as far back as 1965 sensibilities might have been willing to accept or comprehend; despite his elliptical and sometimes opaque interests, Stevens was still trying to make a commercial movie. Crucifixes appear several times but feature little direct meaning, and at one point the Incubus transmogrifies into a black goat, also a familiar image, therefore a recognizable shorthand. More power is invested in the sign of the cross and the prong-fingered "devil horns," to represent each side's talismanic strength, but the story prefers to cite the balance of power between "the God of Light" and "the God of Darkness," as though the tension between these two is the only thing really holding the world together. INCUBUS may be the first Zen horror film, so thoughtful is its balance between Yin and Yang. INCUBUS has also been called Bergman-esque, due to mostly superficial similarities -- the prominence of the oceanside in the beginning, the stark black-and-white cinematography, the rough-weave clothing, robes and cowls worn by most of the cast, and the fact that the gobble of Esperanto can sound oddly Scandanavian. ("Nomen Tuum," by the way, is not Esperanto, but simple Latin for "your name," or, as in the Pater Noster [Lord's Prayer], "thy name.") When Stevens cited Japanese cinema over the supposed Bergman influence, he was thinking of the Kurosawa classics with their dilemmas of honor and betrayal, and the sparks often struck between morals and love. In fact, William Fraker -- then Conrad Hall's camera operator -- was nicknamed "Fraker-sawa." A shot he executed for "Forms" is repeated inside the Mission, as the camera tracks a running man and does a roll-over into an upside-down POV, all without a cut, accomplished by putting Fraker on a blanket with a hand-held camera and dragging him across the floor. After the location shoot had wrapped, Fraker also shot the final sequence (Kia's battle with the Incubus) "somewhere in the San Fernando Valley," according to producer Taylor. This prompted Stevens to remark to Taylor, in one of their last conversations prior to Stevens' death in April, 1998: "We're probably one of the few films in history to have been shot by two Academy Award-winning cinematographers!" Apart from minor tricks of light and smoke, there are no special effects in INCUBUS. It is genuinely minimalist, sometimes to its detriment -- particularly when the viewer comes to realize, early on, that so many long shots of people walking from one place to another exist simply to swallow up running time. On the other hand, Nomen Tuum comes to eerie life largely through Conrad Hall's camerawork and strategies of shooting through or past moving foliage, plus his repeatedly surprising interpretations of depth within the frame. One shot of Kia moving up on a plant which appears to be deep in the foreground, and far from her, until she touches it, is startling; a later setup, framed in the windows of an abandoned house as tall, waving grass punctuates first Marc's passage, then Kia's, is breathtaking. Another inspired sequence depicts Kia on the hunt for an honest man to corrupt; she spies on a coterie of monks who, one by one, are all revealed to have dirty little secrets -- so much for the power of religion! (The monks, incidentally, are portrayed by crew members Ted Mossman, Jay Ashworth and Forrest Butler, the latter two of whom were also former OUTER LIMITS workers.) Like the glimpses afforded by certain episodes of THRILLER and TWILIGHT ZONE, along with what is probably his best feature role, in Roger Corman's self-avowed "message" film THE INTRUDER (1961), INCUBUS affords us a last look at a pre-STAR TREK William Shatner, who does his best to make Esperanto sound natural, and largely succeeds in his strange role due to what appears to be an endearing, good-humored approach to his character. Most everyone on the set, Shatner included, was not working for money. Milos Milos (Milosevic), previously seen as a member of the Soviet submarine crew in THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING, THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING (1966), scenery-chomps the part of the Incubus but is fully up to the demands of a scary movie; his most memorable action, however, was precipitating the murder-suicide of himself and Mickey Rooney's fifth wife, Barbara Ann Thompson, in early 1966. INCUBUS was Allyson Ames' biggest role. Shortly after INCUBUS was completed she divorced Leslie Stevens and married an East Coast financier. In 1966 she also appeared briefly in TEXAS ACROSS THE RIVER; her last film role seems to have been in SIMON, KING OF THE WITCHES (1971). Ann Atmar, who provides INCUBUS with a surprising bit of (suggested) nudity, also committed suicide shortly after completion of the film. INCUBUS is the first -- and to date, only -- film shot entirely in Esperanto. Presented as a universal secondary language by Polish oculist Ludwig L. Zamenhof in 1887 after 15 years of development, Esperanto is not the first "planned language," but it remains the most prevalent. Hitler, Stalin, and Joseph McCarthy all derided it. Over 30,000 books have been published in it, including the work of Dante, Tolstoy, Goethe, Ibsen and Sartre. The liner notes to Elvis Costello's Blood and Chocolate album were in Esperanto, and Sun Microsystems briefly advertised Java as "the Esperanto of computer systems." It was exactly the sort of global village conceit that would appeal to Leslie Stevens, who (in 1969) published a book on what he called "Electronic-Social Transformation," who (in 1971) helped purchase a defrocked Titan missile base to convert into an ecological showplace called Earthside, and who instituted a language class at Daystar Productions on the theory that multi-lingual capabilities could only help the company in foreign markets. "Esperanto was (Leslie's) new thing," said associate producer Elaine Michea, "and I desperately tried to talk him into shooting it two ways so he'd at least have something to market. But he's pretty stubborn when he makes up his mind to do something, so it didn't have a Chinaman's chance ... and it was never released." Ninety percent of the Dominic Frontiere score was tracked from OUTER LIMITS sessions, the majority of the music coming from the episodes "Nightmare" and "The Mice." Frontiere also claimed to have used the orchestra for the Patty Duke film BILLIE, which he was conducting at the time, to secure some bits and pieces for INCUBUS. "Dominic said that all Hollywood had contributed to INCUBUS but didn't know it," noted Taylor. The "Nightmare" sequence is easily Frontiere's most outré set of cues; balanced against the odd sound of the Esperanto dialogue, it contributes enormously to the otherworldliness of INCUBUS. Stevens' script for INCUBUS is quite specific in the classical images it wished to reference. The woodcuts used in the title sequence are specified in order. Kia has "a Gioconda mouth," is posed "like a Boticelli painting," and her chase with Olin "resembles the Hero tapestries." Stevens wrote the screenplay in English and then had all the dialogue translated to Esperanto. Anticipating that the devilish bent of his artsy little independent film was virtually guaranteed to queer the deal for the use of Big Sur Beach or the Mission of San Antonio, Stevens cranked out a "stealth" version of the screenplay to safely cloak INCUBUS as a documentary titled RELIGIOUS LEGENDS OF OLD MONTEREY. Had anyone unauthorized picked up the script, they'd have seen a blueprint for a movie about ten myths (also specified by title), with stage direction heavily emphasizing the local scenery ... and a lot of incomprehensible dialogue in Esperanto. Here is how Stevens re-interpreted the bloody battle during which Marc stabs the Incubus:
The "brothers" are Marc and the Incubus, the "farm girl" is Kia, and the "mother" is Amael. Pretty soon:
Despite the obvious written references to death, blood, and vengeance in the dialogue (which remains baldly untouched, in Esperanto) the stage direction maintains that the conflict lies in the farm girl convincing the younger brother to "show he is a real man," by admitting he cheated to win by tripping his brother. Considering that the stealth script was evidently written in a big hurry and its primary aim was to fill pages with what looked like a screenplay to deter notice from what was really being filmed, Stevens' doppelganger draft, at 57 pages, is actually longer than its INCUBUS equivalent. Overall it is quite ingenious, and in many places pretty funny, considering the gruesome nature of the story it hides. The corrupt monks, for example, are glossed over as "settlers in their Sunday outfits;" where, in INCUBUS, one buries "treasure, offal, or a dead infant," in LEGENDS it is merely "breakfast garbage." INCUBUS cannot escape looking like an OUTER LIMITS episode (neither can STONEY BURKE, for that matter), and the Contempo III videocassette release is quite smooth and crisp, with fairly saturated blacks and negligible print wear most noticeable during the reel changes. Since the source print was an unprojectable artifact, a frame-by-frame optical negative was made in Paris, then digitally sweetened. The drawback that the source print featured only French subtitles for the Esperanto dialogue has forced the superimposition of black boxes into which the English equivalents were inserted; frequently the boxes block out much more space than the dialogue requires -- an unfortunate compromise -- and very often the subtitles themselves ride distractingly higher in the frame than they should, even though that's where the French dialogue was to begin with, too. Lacking a theatrical release, INCUBUS never had a one-sheet poster. Now it does (by artist Vince Emery), and a signed limited edition of 100 copies is available through the project website at The tape box features the poster art in a slightly redder shade. A PAL format release is also planned, or, for you Esperantists: Nun havebla en la amerika-japana televidsistemo NTSC, post nelonge en la europa sistemo PAL.
As American filmakers attempted to duplicate the French New Wave in the early 1960s, hundreds of neophyte producers bankrolled modest independent projects like INCUBUS. While the film allowed Leslie Stevens to indulge his lifelong penchant for eclectic passions and oddball information, its aspirations to art-house notoriety were dashed by its failure to secure a distributor, and decades later, those viewing the film may see only a micro-budgeted curiosity conceived and shot by Americans and dealing mostly with familiar tropes about the nature of good and evil. But its noteworthiness is due to more than its rarity, or its feted status in France, or the fact that it features William Shatner declaiming in a lingo few filmgoers can understand. It is, at its very minimum, a captivating, time-travel snapshot of a committed band of mid-Sixties commercial artists, honestly daring to be different. "I was so very close to it, but it was a real weird picture; such a downbeat thing," said Elaine Michea. "So many tragedies were connected to it, and it was the final production of Daystar." (This piece was originally published in #53 under the title "Dark God Rising: Leslie Stevens' INCUBUS." Copyright © David J. Schow, 1999. All rights reserved. Use of the INCUBUS poster image is by permission of Anthony Taylor and Contempo III Productions, and may not be reproduced.) |
"Lost classics" are the whispered myth-form of any subculture; every
collector has his or her Grail and will be overjoyed to let you know
about it at length. When Leslie Stevens founded Daystar Productions
in 1959 as Hollywood's first "Free-Independent" production company
(that is, lacking a lot or soundstages), he had no idea that his
outfit would generate more TV and feature films doomed to "lost classic" status
than any five competitors.
...