gilligan1965 I like every aspect of this movie! :)It's B&W; very dim and dark; the settings are eerie; the acting is great; the story is well-conceived and scary; the Esperanto language, if one is not familiar, gives the impression that the characters are speaking some ancient and lost language; and, best of all, everything about this old cult-classic gives the viewer the impression that this is set in some Godforsaken, yet, somewhat beautiful, evil European township where incubi and succubi wander the countryside in search of stray human victims! This movie gives off the same creepy vibes as did "The Twilight Zone;" "The Seventh Seal;" and, all of those Spanish and Italian horror movies that came out in the 1960s and 1970s...yet, this was filmed in California!?!? :)Then, again, California isn't all blonde-babes and sunny beaches...at this time, it had Anton Szandor LaVay. This 'California' movie also had its curses - someone destroyed all of the prints of this movie (only one was found later; remastered; and, re-released); Milos Milos, the 'Incubus' in this movie, murdered Mickey Rooney's estranged wife, Carolyn Mitchell, then killed himself; actress Ann Atmar (Arndis - Marco's sister) committed suicide; and, years later, William Shatner was a suspect in his wife's drowning-death.Something great came out of this movie, too, other than the movie itself..."Captain Kirk!"The movie I compare this to the most, due to the terrible events that occurred after production (as with this movie); and, its darkness and evil agenda as far as the incubus is concerned...is "Rosemary's Baby." Like the incubus in this movie, concerning the unsuspecting Arndis, the Devil in "Rosemary's Baby" also played 'hide-the-evil-serpent' with the unsuspecting Rosemary. Despite rumors and urban legend, Anton Szandor LaVey 'didn't' play the Devil in "Rosemary's Baby.""Rosemary's Baby" had a terrible following-of-events as did this movie - "Helter Skelter;" Mia Farrow's on-the-set divorce papers delivery from Frank Sinatra; Roman Polanski's later stachatory rape conviction; and, John Lennon's murder in 1980 at the "Dakota" that was the setting of this movie.However...these are the controversially-scary and believable things that people apply to anything-and-everything in order to add intrigue to an already-great horror movie; or, to anything else.In the end, the succubus (Kia) 'really-did' love Marco after all; and, in the end, she fought the incubus over this. I like how the incubus, after turning into a goat and fighting with Kia showed 'wiggling-tongue' at 1:11:57! I would have, too, if I was on top of her...Allyson Ames was "HOT!" :)This is a great movie, all-the-way, and, I give it EIGHT STARS! :)

Michael_Elliott Incubus (1965) *** (out of 4)Bizarre film is the only one ever to be filmed in Esperanto, a language created in 1887 and needless to say, it was rarely used. The film tells the story of a blond succubus (Allyson Ames) who lures bad men to their deaths. Her latest catch (William Shatner) isn't evil and ends up falling in love with her so the succubus must try and make him go bad. I guess the best way to describe this film is take the images from Bergman's THE SEVENTH SEAL and mix it with the atmosphere of CITY OF THE DEAD and you come up with this thing. Now, I'm really not sure why Stevens wanted to shoot this in Esperanto as it does nothing for the film. It doesn't add atmosphere, it doesn't add any creepiness and in the end it doesn't add a single thing. What the film does have going for it is some terrific cinematography by future Oscar-winner Conrad Hall. The look of this film is quite remarkable and comes close to the before mentioned Bergman film. The black and white cinematography adds so much to the movie because this is pretty much a story of good and evil. The evil is constantly shown as black and the good is in white. It's a pretty simple thing but it works wonders simply because of the atmosphere it creates. One of the best sequences in the film is a mixture of the two when Ames and Shatner are getting to know one another and an eclipse happens. Both Shatner and Ames are extremely good in their roles. This is where the Esperanto language is most effective and that's by seeing these actors be able to learn it and act their parts while remembering these lines. Shatner is very impressive here as he perfectly gives off that good guy image and makes us believe that he really is a caring guy of God who can fight off evil. In a strange bit of trivia, two of the bad guys here ended up dead within a year of the film being complete and this is something that many believe is a curse of the film. Ann Atmar killed herself shortly after the movie and Milos Milos also killed himself and murdered Mickey Rooney's, at the time, estranged wife. I don't think the film is a complete success mainly because the screenplay itself is pretty weak. There's not too much of a story here so I can't help but think something a little better would have improved the film. With that said, this is certainly an original work and the cinematography and atmosphere make it worth sitting through at least once.

ottfried A lot of things have been said about this film. Some people say "cult" films are for people with "bad" or "no" taste, I suppose, as opposed to the by-products or off-springs of classical breeding, but strangely a lot of B- or C-movies become just that by having (too?) high aspirations based on knowledge of the classics and then-recent scientific findings and too little contact with the main stream audience, who do not acknowledge references to classics and could not care less about where the future is going.why would anyone shoot a film entirely in Esperanto, then thought of as the coming universal language? Why would anyone have a brilliant stills art-photographer shoot a moving picture? Why would the total context of the movie be a feeling of mythological "always"? Why have the leading man be a (private) person so clearly caught up between classical hero - set everything right by acting - and thinker - the inner seeker of truth? The concept of the "autor"-movie, the not-so-slick-but-honest-depiction-of-a-necessary- story, is what does it for me. And this is one of them. If you look for faults, that's what you'll find. Look for meaning...

Lee Eisenberg Obviously, the two things that "Incubus" really has going for it are that it's spoken entirely in the artificial language of Esperanto (listening to that language, it sounds like a bastardization of Italian), and that it stars William Shatner right before he became Capt. Kirk. He plays a man who gets involved with a devil woman. I know, it doesn't sound like much, but it's neat hearing Esperanto spoken. As it is, this movie seems sort of like a premonition of Shatner's movie "The Devil's Rain" (in which he also battles the Prince of Darkness).So anyway, this is a neat time capsule. And Esperanto sounds like a neat language. I'd like to learn it.