Due to my growing interest in learning Esperanto, today I watched the 1966 horror film Incubus (Esperanto, Inkubo), which was directed by Leslie Stevens (the creator of The Outer Limits) and starred a pre-Star Trek William Shatner. The film's dialogue is delivered in Esperanto (which, by the way, is an artificially constructed language, created by L. L. Zamenhof to be an easy-to-use auxiliary language), apparently because the director thought it would give the film an eerie quality. I think that in this the film is partially successful (some of the black and white visual imagery also works well in this regard), but one major problem is that the cast is not very good at pronouncing the language. Even for a beginner, many of the gaffes are painfully obvious, and it makes one wonder if Stevens knew that much about Esperanto himself.
Other than the language and the imagery, the acting just isn't convincing, and the story is rather banal and doesn't make a lot of sense (e.g. the elder succubus, Amael, goes from forbidding her sister succubus from harming Shatner's character to wanting him destroyed in almost the blink of an eye; later on Marko is said to have "blood on his hands" for killing the incubus, when the thing didn't really die; etc). These issues are typical for an American B-movie of the period, and I knew that is what this was beforehand, so I am not really complaining. It was kind of entertaining, in a cheesy, stupid way, and it does have an interesting title sequence of interspersed magical and Satanic symbols. My grip is just that the idea of the film was promising, and I think it would have been so easy to make it work more effectively.
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