| Sophie Durbin |
Incubus plays at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, September 19th, through Sunday, September 21st. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
I have a strict “don’t talk about people from your past in your writing, they didn’t sign up for that” policy, but I am going to break it to share that I had an ex tell me (I was an admittedly overzealous linguistics minor in college at the time) that the concept of preserving languages and promoting linguistic diversity was pompous, and that linguists should be focused on promoting fewer languages so that we can all communicate without barriers. In a long-form esprit d’escalier moment, I realize now that instead of bursting into tears, I should have just pointed him toward the strange story of Esperanto, the world’s most successful auxiliary language, and made him watch Leslie Stevens’s Incubus. Esperanto was invented in the late 1800s to promote world peace but ultimately became a novelty tongue with a reputation kind of like spiritualism and mediumship from the same era: famously hacky to some, and practiced in utmost seriousness to this day by others. Incubus, one of the few films ever made entirely in Esperanto, is certainly partially responsible for this legacy. It’s a testament to the power of language alone to cultivate an atmosphere of horror, and a key text in the general failure of Esperanto to meet the noble expectations of its creation.
Leslie Stevens built reliably eerie, otherworldly environments; he was mostly known for creating sci-fi series The Outer Limits before directing Incubus.1 He wrote the screenplay, and then hired experts to translate his work into Esperanto. He was an admirer of the language, and thought it may help him break into arthouse cinemas and foreign markets where subtitles were acceptable.2 Incubus takes place in the fictional village of Nomen Tuum, shot in splendid black and white by Conrad Hall at Big Sur. The town is filled with evil succubi who prey upon visitors to a holy well. The actors, who all had about ten days to learn Esperanto, don’t seem to know if they’re in a Bergman film, Meshes of the Afternoon, or both.3 Ironically, a horror film staged entirely in Esperanto because the language sounds creepy is in direct defiance of L.L. Zamenhof’s intentions when he invented the language. He was a Jewish ophthalmologist from Bialystock, Poland, which was then part of the Russian Empire and not a fun place in which to be a Jewish ophthalmologist. Zamenhof identified the root of the societal violence and conflict to be the division of languages, which he determined could be remediated with a new language designed to serve as a lingua franca everywhere in the world. Esperanto’s secret weapon is its easy-to-master grammatical system, in which knowing just a few roots, suffixes, and prefixes allots the speaker with endless possibilities for getting their point across. It uses primarily vocabulary derived from the Romance languages with a smattering of Germanic, Slavic, and Greek. The effect in Incubus is a language that sounds oddly placeless—mysteriously Italian, Dutch, or just vaguely Eastern European all within the same sentence. The result is uncanny, as our ears attempt to make sense of what the actors are saying, catching familiar sounds but unable to grasp their meanings.
Because the actors are speaking Esperanto but they all learned their lines phonetically in a fortnight, there is always a curious and unnatural distance between what we are hearing and the actor’s behavior. They presumably haven’t partaken in any of the things that will get you to learn a language, beyond rote memorization: namely, conversing and listening to native speakers. So yes, the Esperanist succubi of Nomen Tuum are frightening. They don’t speak to each other with familiarity; some facial expressions ring false because it feels more like the actors are mute or feeling constrained by understanding their own words, miming their emotions. This isn’t exactly the fault of Esperanto the language: there is and was a thriving population of devoted Esperantists, including even some native speakers. The real-world community of Esperantists is united not just by their language but by a shared past marked by repression and even violence: they were associated with Communism and targeted during the Holocaust. By the 1960s, this culture was certainly established enough that it makes sense that a group of Esperantists attended the San Francisco premiere of Incubus and laughed maniacally at the actors’ egregious mispronunciations.4,5
I mentioned Meshes of the Afternoon above, and it seems to me that the similarities may be in that, like Maya Deren, Stevens found a choreographic approach useful as a communication tool for his characters. Bizarre movements supplement the strained, macabre dialogue. The succubi have their own system of hand gestures; they are also constantly reactive to the physical gestures of others (for example, they are unable to tolerate the sign of the cross). The dreamlike movements, when combined with the strained Esperanto speech, conjure a nightmarish fable. Stevens may have indeed been trying to construct a perfect nightmare: the Outer Limits episode “Nightmare” is where some of the spooky score is lifted from, and when Arndis describes her bad dream she uses the Esperanto word “inkubo,” which seems to mean both incubus (a male demon that seduces its victims at night) and “nightmare.”6 Here, Esperanto has quite the opposite effect of world peace: it facilitates an environment where meaning is constantly shifting and ambiguous, and language seems to break down, making room for more primordial, physical methods of exchange.
Ultimately, the Esperanto world that Stevens creates has little to do with the Esperanto that Zamenhof created. The Esperantist community is still active. In fact, the production is infamously cursed: within a year of the film’s release, succubus actress Ann Altmar committed suicide, and Milos Milos (who plays the Incubus himself) murdered his girlfriend and shot himself. This dark legacy, combined with the general commercial failure of Incubus, may be why no one ever attempted another full length American-made Esperanto film. Still, the language lives on in cinema and television, usually to add a futuristic or sinister flavor to an imagined world. Despite his best intentions at the genesis of Esperanto, Zamenhof’s linguistic utopia remains a dream—and on film, it’s usually a bad one.
Footnotes
1 I don’t remember any episodes specifically but I know I loved it. Think Twilight Zone vibes but more UFOs.
2 Taylor, Anthony, Conrad L. Hall, and William Fraker. Interview by David J. Schow. Incubus DVD, 1999, quoted in Miller, John M. “The Gist (Incubus).” Turner Classic Movies. Accessed September 5, 2025. https://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/79187/incubus#articles-reviews?articleId=258907.
3 The movie might actually have more in common with Night Tide, which features Dennis Cooper as a sailor who falls in love with a carnival mermaid who’s REALLY a mermaid being called back to her mermaid family cult, who speak a scary Mermaid language.
4 Taylor, Anthony, Conrad L. Hall, and William Fraker. Interview by David J. Schow. Incubus DVD, 1999, quoted in Miller, John M. “The Gist (Incubus).” Turner Classic Movies. Accessed September 5, 2025. https://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/79187/incubus#articles-reviews?articleId=258907.
5 For example, William Shatner pronounces some of his words with French nasality, a feature absent in Esperanto and likely influenced by his upbringing in Canada. Miller, John M. “Trivia (Incubus).” Turner Classic Movies. Accessed September 5, 2025. https://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/79187/incubus#trivia.
6 Miller, “Trivia (Incubus).”
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon