William Shatner speaks Esperanto and the Curse of Incubus

For the past two years my husband and I have gone on Esperanto learning kicks over the summer. This year we had enough of the language under our belts to start having fun. We ordered a book of poetry in Esperanto, downloaded some songs from iTunes in the language, and we even found a film spoken entirely in Esperanto!

The film is called Incubus. Made in 1965, Incubus falls somewhere between a guilty-pleasure B horror flick and an Ingmar Bergman Cries and Whispers or The Seventh Seal. The plot of this movie isn't nearly as important as the emotion and symbology conveyed by the cinematography- which the film can express much better than I can. There has been a lot of discussion about William Shatner's pronunciation of Esperanto- which he learned expressly for the film in a matter of weeks.

But what I'm really interested in is the curse. The special features of the Incubus DVD made a convincing case for the Incubus Curse. Wikipedia did a good job of enumerating the incidents, too.

1. The pure young woman threatened with rape by evil was played by Ann Atmar, who committed suicide a few weeks after the film wrapped.

2. The spooky, creepy bad guy in the film was played by Milos Milos. About a year after the film was shot, Milos shot his girlfriend, then himself.

3. One of the female "bad guys" was played by Eloise Hardt. Her daughter was later kidnapped and murdered.

4. In 1993 Consolidated Film Industries reported that the only print and all negatives of the film had been lost in a fire.

To listen to the film's producer, Anthony Taylor, describe the incident, he was crushed when he learned the last surviving print of Incubus was destroyed. Several years later, Taylor's friend happened across a battered and forgotten version of the film (subtitled in French) at the Cinematique Francaise in Paris. The print was in awful shape, and it took international cooperation, modern technology, Taylor's passion to revive the film, and funds and promotion from the Sci-Fi Channel to bring the light and shadow, the love and hate, the purity and corruption of Incubus to a new generation of spec fic fans.