Largely unseen since the mid-'60s due to the accidental destruction of many of its prints, 1965's Incubus is the first American film to feature dialogue in Esperanto, an artificial universal language that never quite caught on. Saved from obscurity in the late '90s and restored with funds contributed by the SCI FI Channel, Incubus is now available on DVD and video for the first time. Written and directed by Outer Limits veteran Leslie Stevens, the film stars Allyson Ames as a comely, Satan-worshipping aspiring demon who tires of luring the wicked and weak to their deaths in a stark, foggy village overrun with dark forces. Eager to impress her dark master, and desperate for a little diversity, Ames sets out to seduce and destroy a righteous, battle-weary soldier (William Shatner), much to the chagrin of her more convention-bound colleagues in evil. Ambitious, portentous, and misguided in equal measures, Incubus employs the exaggerated visual style of German Expressionism to tell a story that aims for a primal, fairy-tale simplicity, but ends up more silly than scary. The film is hobbled by Stevens' extravagantly overwritten dialogue, but it also suffers from the miscasting of Shatner, an actor not inclined to subtlety even under ideal circumstances. Playing less a character than an abstract philosophical concept, Shatner mangles Esperanto in much the same way he's mangled his native tongue, particularly during an unintentionally funny monologue in which he attempts to convince Ames that he will lay down with her, but only after marriage. Stevens' script is a major distraction, but cinematographer Conrad L. Hall (who would later win two Academy Awards) does a terrific job nevertheless, giving the black-and-white film a striking, otherworldly look that recalls the bleak hellscape created for Seconds by fellow master James Wong Howe. Hall's remarkable work gives the film value above and beyond its worth as a historical anomaly, but Incubus is still muddled and pretentious in any language.