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The Incubus
[Elite]
1982; color
Directed by John Hough
Starring: John Cassavetes, John Ireland, Kerrie Keane, Helen Hughes & Erin Noble
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The Incubus is part supernatural thriller and part horror flick, with a touch of Gothic eeriness thrown in for good measure. Set in the fictional town of Galen, an unseen entity is brutally raping women to death. Actually, the first victim survives the attack but is so traumatized she can't offer the police any help; all she can mumble is "monster." A doctor who's a newcomer to the town, and apparently the only physician on call as well as the only one performing autopsies, suspects something's really wrong when he finds the sperm left behind by the rapist to be tinted red. In conjunction with all of this going on, a local teenage boy is tormented by violent dreams that look like outtakes from the Knights Templar scenes from the Blind Dead movies. (Hooded figures menacing a girl tied to a rack or a table.) Just by coincidence, every time he has one of these dreams another woman is attacked and killed. His oh-so-creepy clad-in-black grandmother tries to reassure him that they're just dreams and nothing to worry about but he knows there's something else going on. Conveniently, he just so happens to be dating the daughter of the doctor, which doesn't please the doc one bit because he sees the small town as nothing more than a gossip mill he'd like to avoid entirely. While the police chief would prefer much the news of the attacks be kept out of the newspaper, the new editor - who's also a dead ringer for the doctor's dead wife, but that's a whole other subplot - plasters the story all over the front page, insinuating a gang of rapists is responsible. She later apologizes for that allegation after doing some digging and finding out the same thing happened in Galen 30 years prior and those crimes all went unsolved. This somehow leads the doctor to the conclusion that supernatural forces are tied in to the boy's dreams, which have also now become waking trance-like states / fits, are responsible. As the boy becomes more and more tormented and his granny tries to protect him, secrets of the past slowly trickle out that lead to the inevitable conclusion there's an Incubus being summoned up from the boy's subconscious, and that it is responsible for all the horror. (I know, it's a stretch, but once granny relates her family have been witch hunters for hundreds of years and the boy's dead mom was persecuted as a witch, lots of things fall into place.) The bloody finale, which is the only time we actually see the Incubus - and it's a two-second glance at that - answered some questions but, for the most part, had me scratching my head and thinking, 'What the hell was that all about?' Confusing to be sure, The Incubus is definitely not for everyone. In fact, aside from fans of all things horror from the early '80s, I'm not sure who the audience for this film really is.
—the Kommandant
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