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The bizarre story of a long-lost horror film made entirely in Esperanto, starring William Shatner
Written by Adam Epstein
Before he commanded the starship USS Enterprise, William Shatner was the lead actor in Incubus, a low-budget, black-and-white horror film directed by Leslie Stevens (creator of the sci-fi anthology series The Outer Limits). Incubus wasn’t your average art house flick: It was filmed entirely in the constructed language Esperanto, one of only two films in history to do so.
Created in 1887 by Polish ophthalmologist L.L. Zamenhof, Esperanto was meant to ease communication between people who did not share a common language in order to foster peace around the world. Today, it has only a handful of native speakers, but 2 million people across more than 100 countries are believed to be fluent. Popular language-learning app Duolingo offers a free course in it.
Incubus did not employ Esperanto to promote world peace. Rather, the filmmakers thought it sounded creepy and might add an otherworldly element to the film. One reviewer said Incubus was “like a foreign film from a country that never existed.”
The film is set in an imaginary village where travelers come to use a magic well with mysterious healing properties. It’s there where Shatner, playing a wounded soldier, meets and falls in love with a succubus.
Shatner and the film’s other actors were not Esperanto speakers. They learned their lines phonetically in just a few weeks, and filmed them without an Esperanto expert on set. Unsurprisingly, the film was slammed by actual Esperanto speakers when it debuted at the San Francisco Film Festival in 1966. Film critics, unaware that the Esperanto pronunciation was atrocious, tended to enjoy the film.
But then things turned tragic.
Ann Atmar, who played one of the film’s succubi, committed suicide shortly after filming ended.
A few months later, Milos Milos, a Serbian actor who played the titular incubus, murdered Barbara Ann Thomason – the estranged wife of comedian Mickey Rooney – and then killed himself in Rooney’s bed.
Then, in 1968, the daughter of another actress in the film, Eloise Hardt, was kidnapped and murdered. Her killer was never identified, but police believed she may have been murdered by members of the Manson family, who would kill actress Sharon Tate a year later. Tate attended the Incubus premiere with her boyfriend at the time, movie director Roman Polanski.
Others involved with Incubus were beset by yet more unfortunate events: Stevens’s production company went under, the music editor was imprisoned for scalping Super Bowl tickets, and most prints of the film itself were destroyed in a fire. Many believed the film was cursed.
The film struggled to find distributors even though it appeared to be widely admired. The strange language was hard to sell, and some companies didn’t want to be associated with the horrific Milos murder-suicide. So it wound up in France, where it was embraced by the country’s art-house film community but soon lost to history.
In 1993, producer Anthony Taylor wanted to release Incubus on home video but couldn’t find a single print. A few years later, a friend located a damaged copy at Cinémathèque Française, a French film archive. He restored the print himself, and with funding from the American cable network Sci-Fi (now called Syfy), Incubus was finally released on DVD in 2001. You can now buy it on Amazon, if you dare.
Incubus didn’t curse everyone, of course. Shatner would go on to star in Star Trek and become one of Hollywood’s most successful and recognizable actors. Cinematographer Conrad Hall would go on to win three Academy Awards for his work on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, American Beauty, and Road to Perdition.
In his 2011 book Shatner Rules, Shatner wrote that while filming Star Trek a few months after he finished filming Incubus, he was threatened by a group of Esperantists who then put a curse on the film. After that, Shatner said he started destroying every copy of the film he could find. But you can still find it in its entirety on YouTube.
Westworld’s season 2 trailer shows the robot uprising has just begun
Westworld‘s Season 2 trailer was shown today by HBO at Hall H at San Diego Comic-Con, and the host uprising has finally come. The spot starts with a player piano starting up and Bernard Lowe (Jeffrey Wright) staring at the body of a dead tiger, all while “I Gotta Be Me” by Sammy Davis Jr. cheerfully plays on in the background. Soon after, we see Maeve (Thandie Newton) looking calmly over a scene of carnage, and Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) on horseback, aiming a gun at partygoers. The Man in the Black’s face is splattered by blood and he smiles slowly.
Expect to see more of Samurai World
Westworld won’t return until 2018 and a specific date has not been announced yet. Thanks to how ambitious the production is and where creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy want to take their story, the second season will take some time before it debuts. In an interview with Variety, Nolan said, “It’s an ambitious project, and HBO has encouraged us to take the time and resources that we need to work on each stage of that.”
Not that fans mind. Comic-Con this year featured a venue transformed to look like Westworld, and it’s easy to imagine devotees spending the next several months theorizing about where the show will go.
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Business Tycoons and Their Blockchain-Based Digital Currency Investments
Several wealthy entrepreneurs have started to divest from their traditional investment vehicles and shift their focus to Blockchain-based crypto currencies.
Among the billionaire, investors are former hedge fund manager Michael Novogratz, Kik founder and chief executive officer (CEO) Ted Livingston, investment mogul Tim Draper, and serial entrepreneur Mark Cuban.
Cuban, Livingston, Draper
The different investments made by these businessmen shows the promise of digital currencies as a vehicle to diversify one’s assets, store value, and establish market-changing platforms.
Livingston has announced his plans to establish a development space dubbed the Kin Foundation, which will use an Ethereum-based token for the disbursement of value. Livingston claimed that he selected Ethereum to launch the token due to its broad market reach.
“We did look at quite a few Blockchains. At the end of the day, it seemed like Ethereum was the obvious choice. It has wide adoption, a great platform, and ERC20 tokens that create liquidity right away.”
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Cuban, meanwhile, is planning to participate in the ERC20 token generation event for UnikoinGold. The move to stake his reputation by announcing his support to the event is a proof of the value and mainstream acknowledgment of the Ethereum token.
Draper, on the other hand, has acquired a 10% interest in the ERC20-compliant token called Credo, which was launched by a company of the same name. Credo was established with an aim to fight email spamming. Draper also supported the Ethereum-based Bancor project and Tezos platform’s token generation event.
Novogratz invested in Bitcoin and Ethereum when he saw the significant increase in the prices of the digital currencies. He, however, decided to sell some of the currencies before the decline of their prices. He said that about 10% of his net worth is still in digital currencies. Novogratz has also projected that the cryptocurrency market could hit a value of $5 trillion in the next five years.