Today in 1966, the release of a movie unlike any other: “Incubus,” an Esperanto-language movie starring future Star Trek icon and occasional real-world space traveler William Shatner.
Yes, before he led the USS Enterprise, or sang Mr Tambourine Man, or went into space, William Shatner spoke Esperanto in a demon movie.
The movie is set in a village where an ancient well can make people healthy and beautiful.
Demons hang out near the well so they can harvest human souls, except that one of them ends up falling in love with a human.
The filmmakers wanted to make an eerie supernatural thriller that was geared more toward the art house than the drive-in.
And to do that, they had the actors speak Esperanto, a language invented in the late 19th century in the hopes of creating a universal language that would bring about world peace.
In this case, they simply wanted a language that sounded otherworldly.
And to critics, it worked; one said it sounded “like a foreign film from a country that never existed.”
But since none of the actors spoke Esperanto, they had to learn their lines phonetically.
Actual Esperanto speakers were reportedly miffed at the pronounciations in one of the very few movies in their language.
And even though there were subtitles, a lot of theaters said no thanks to a creepy movie in this obscure tongue.
That was just the start of the trouble with “Incubus.”
Cast members suffered numerous personal tragedies, to the point that some people thought the movie was cursed.
Most of the movie’s prints were lost in a fire, while one that was supposed to be used for a video release in the 1990s was either lost or thrown away.
Fortunately there was one more copy found sitting in a French film archive.
The filmmakers used that to restore and re-release “Incubus,” which is now a cult classic.
In 2001, producer Anthony Taylor told the Los Angeles Times that maybe the movie was simply well ahead of its time, so maybe they should start working on “Incubus 2.”
One site we check a lot is Boing Boing, and recently they posted a stunning video.
According to the clip, a guy had just bought an airplane and was allowed to taxi the craft through part of an airport – except that he managed to accidentally take off and therefore had to try to land having never flown before.
Eerie Cult Classic ‘Incubus’ Returns After Lengthy Exile (Los Angeles Times)
Man with zero hours flying experience accidentally takes off, and barely lands (Boing Boing)
