“The art of interpretation is virtually one of translation,”[1] wrote Susan Sontag in 1964. But there is an impulse to resist interpreting that which is accidental and momentary, to take its singularity for granted. For a film like Leslie Stevens’ Incubus, one that swings between genres like a pendulum, such an impulse is enough to erase it from common memory. But suppose the value of such a curiosity is not translated via style and tone. Suppose that Incubus shape-shifts into an existential drama and an allegorical horror piece before collapsing into the schlock impulses of a satanic comedy. And though it never lodges itself within any of these cinematic houses, their exteriors appear to us direct and gleaming in the brief moments of their formation. “What is needed is a vocabulary—a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, vocabulary—for forms,”[2] Sontag continues in the same essay. Which filmic bodies shall we summon then, which projections and vocabularies, in order to translate Incubus? This is the integral mystery at the heart of Stevens’ creation. By all means, it is supposed to be a horror film; such is the diagnosis of its making. And yet, at every step, the story clothes itself in new forms, as if attempting to work through the paradoxes of its own existence.
Proudly claimed by its creator as the first and only Esperanto feature, Incubus repeatedly resists decoding, oscillating between agony and hilarity as its actors and crew fail to communicate with the central narrative. The international cast, who were only informed the film wouldn’t be in English after signing their contracts, were given 10 days to prepare for their parts and learn the basics of the constructed language. To be sure, they resorted to memorizing their lines phonetically, borrowing an array of accents, with the final result sounding like someone vocally sleepwalking between French and Spanish. According to the few surviving sources on the film’s production, Stevens adopted Zamenhof’s linguistic invention in order to grant Incubus’ metaphysical thematics a distinctively eerie veneer — one geared toward the burgeoning arthouse crowd.
Set in the fictional village of Nomen Tuum, the story stages a spiritual confrontation between Marc (William Shatner), a wounded soldier returning home, and Kia (Allyson Ames), an ambitious succubus who wishes to corrupt only the purest of souls. To arrange their impending psychomachia, the film plunges itself in Bergmanian pathos. Look, for instance, to the moment when the two succubi, Kia and her sister Amael (Eloise Hardt), confront each other by the shoreline. These pale creatures, standing face to face in black-and-white, are realized with a claustrophobic intensity that recalls Persona’s (1966) Alma and Elisabet. Subjects to a chiaroscuro confrontation, they too turn their heads to the side, sluicing each other in darkness and light, until both faces merge into the mouthless mask of death. And because we see Bergman in Incubus’ monochrome frames, in time, we also start reading him in its themes. As God’s silence rustles in the black tree tops of Bergman’s Fårö, so does it here. Whipped up by the wind, like his counterpart in The Seventh Seal (1957), Death arrives in Nomen Tuum from deep within the impenetrable forest, in the danse macabre heading to the sea.
A second look at the scene reveals a flowerbed of European arthouse entanglements: Clouzot’s Diaboliques (1955) protagonists tightly framed together; Kakogiannis’ choreographed bodies in Electra (1962); the inhospitable expressionism of Varda’s Les Créatures (1966). Even on page, the story encounters an early giallo experiment. The very year Incubus’ cast and crew gathered in Big Sur, thousands of miles away, in a small town in northern Italy, Bazzoni and Rossellini were making The Possessed (1965). Both stories feature a returning protagonist, both negotiate love and darkness through the supernatural, both are loosed by their black-and-white waters.
But Incubus is a cult work in a particular convergence, one that soon enough trades arthouse traditions for an emerging trend: B-horror. Italian gotici and gialli, Roger Corman’s films at AIP, Hammer’s revisionist approach to the canon — all are drifting through Incubus. The typical gothic film follows a predictable form. The hero’s arrival to a place of looming horror, where a battlefield between the realm of the living and that of the dead invariably leads to a deadly confrontation. We see it in Bava’s Black Sunday (1960) and Fisher’s The Devil Rides Out (1968), as their central themes of possession operate on a dipole between the divine and the demonic. Shade cannot be inhabited in the face of such absolutes, and so Stevens abandons Bergman’s vision for archetypical perspectives. Even this cocooned land, articulated in a constructed tongue, is governed by Christian values. “We can lie in the sun naked,” whispers Kia. But Marc tells her that to stay together “as man and woman,” two souls need to first join in love. When we see them next, he is carrying her surrendered body inside an empty church.
Traditionally, the horror story constitutes a cycle: a malignant force challenges a community that in due time elects its noble hero to establish order once again. But it is the subversion of the story’s middle that makes horror such a transgressive genre. It is its monsters with whom we spend most of our time, and it is them whom we perceive as the true hero. And so, horror visits places where it does not dare conclude, but punishment and triumph hold little importance to the viewer who has spent the film’s duration in the ambivalent darkness. When Kia is first introduced as an insatiable succubus, when she speaks of her lofty aspiration to tear the purest soul from heaven, it is she who becomes our hero. But when she is carried into that church, when Marc opposes her through categorically Christian codes of holiness, Incubus starts crumbling under the weight of its unexamined dichotomies. It is simultaneously an approach too submissive for its ambition and too self-aware for its genre. For a work that has abandoned language itself on the altar of the universal, there is no turn of events more absurd than this moral flattening. By the time Kia speaks of being “defiled” by “the holy assault” of being loved and the Prince of Darkness himself is summoned in the body of a goat, the story has leapt right over the current of commercial horror and into the quicksand of a satanic farce. And so Stevens’ creation descends into the pure schlock of self-contradiction.
That which labored to be an allegory ultimately undoes itself in moralizing literality. And as such, Incubus is best understood not through its flawed narrative, but as a palimpsest of cinematic projections, a seesaw between interpretation and codification. The French poet Noël Arnaud once wrote “Je suis l’espace où je suis.” I am the space where I am. Here lie the tendrils of the arthouse; here of the commercial. Let us exchange their truths at the house of Incubus.
[1] Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. London Penguin Books, 1966, p. 5.
[2] ibid. p. 12.
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