CineSavant Column
Hello!
Todays reviews take a detour from weird horror and Sci-fi, but never fear, more fantastic reviews are on the way. We do have a brief fantastic Book Review to offer, for David J. Show’s latest, Incubus: Inside Leslie Stevens’ Lost Horror Classic.
The subject is the same movie we reviewed in 4K Ultra HD just last December 28. Schow is pretty much the reigning authority on the writer-director-producer Leslie Stevens, starting way back when we all had copies of his guidebook to Stevens’ TV show The Outer Limits. This new book is a making-of compendium, an everything-welcome scrapbook of research and analysis. It prints two separate screenplays … one is the ‘cover’ script titled ‘Religious Legends of Old Monterey,’ that helped them get permission to film on church property.
The depth of information here is fairly astonishing, considering how obscure Incubus has become. Schow and his associates Craig Beam and Tom Weaver take us through a dozen weird angles on the film: its relationship to Outer Limits, the script written and performed in Esperanto, the casting of a rather intense group of actors, the artistry of cameraman Conrad Hall, the soundtrack made from the Outer Limits library of Dominic Frontiere cues, the aborted ‘nudie’ film shoot, and of course the suicide of one leading actor and the appalling murder suicide committed by another. And don’t forget ‘Everything ‘William Shatner,’ including his penchant for purloining expensive wigs made for his productions.
Tom Weaver’s entire original interview with the producer is included, telling the tale of how an completed feature film can just be lost and presumed destroyed. Believe me, it’s easy in Hollywood. The entire Esperanto issue is covered — the movie didn’t end up pleasing the language’s proponents in the least.
David Show assembles this with a great deal of wit. He includes even more sideways insights about Leslie Stevens’ stormy private life and his nonconformist approach to his career. The background biography of actor Milos Milosevic is bizarre — at one point he was a bodyguard for French actor Alain Delon.
We also get the lowdown on every previous attempt to bring Incubus to home video, on which author David J. Schow was usually involved. There’s a lot of territoriality in film writing, but Schow isn’t your garden variety fan / video expert. People know he’s the go-to guy for Incubus. There’s no guesswork and no padding in his book.
It’s also well organized, with a full index. Forget where the spin-off show Ghost of Sierra de Cobre was discussed? Page 19.
The compact 250-page item is published by Cimarron Street Books:
Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson