In the early 60s Anthony Taylor, a successful broker with seats on the Chicago Board of Trade and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange as well as an aspiring film producer, was introduced by a friend to director Leslie Stevens. Though Taylor’s experience was limited to some training films for air force pilots, he seized the opportunity to ask Stevens–who was famous for the TV series The Outer Limits and a string of Broadway hits such as The Marriage-Go-Round–if he’d be interested in collaborating with him on a low-budget movie.
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Stevens, who’d been looking to work outside the Hollywood system, took Taylor up on his offer. He wrote a script about a beautiful succubus who tires of destroying the souls of easy prey and focuses her attention on a morally upright soldier. When he doesn’t succumb, she summons an incubus to attack his sister. To evoke an otherworldly, timeless atmosphere, Incubus was shot in black and white in Big Sur, California. It starred William Shatner as the soldier. And all of the dialogue was in Esperanto.
By 1968 no distribution deal had materialized. “Leslie and I decided we would shoot a thing with naked women in it and change it all around,” says Taylor. “We were going to lose the Esperanto. Bill was going to do the narration. We shot some parts in Technicolor. But it was pretty obvious that it just didn’t work.” They stored the masters and all their copies at a lab in LA and went on with their lives.
He hired restoration consultants to clean up the print and arranged for English subtitles to be added. “I was surprised at how good it looked,” says Taylor. “It was a lot better film than I remembered.”
