The movie William Shatner tried to delete from history: “I took it upon myself to destroy every copy”
It takes a special kind of movie for the most famous actor in the cast to dedicate themselves to erasing as many copies from existence as they could lay their hands on, but William Shatner didn’t do it because it was a bad film. It was a bad film, make no mistake, but that wasn’t what drove him to wipe it from the face of the earth.
Instead, his reasons were supernatural. It sounds bizarre, and it is, but it’s not as strange as it appears at first glance. For one thing, the picture in question gained infamy for being one of the most cursed productions of the 1960s, which comes with the territory when a curse was literally placed upon it.
Shot a year before he brought Captain James T Kirk to the airwaves for the first time when Star Trek premiered in September 1966, Shatner took top billing in writer and director Leslie Stevens’ cheap and cheerful horror flick, Incubus.
A run-of-the-mill chiller that follows the actor’s wounded soldier as he stumbles across an ominous and isolated community with dark, dangerous, and potentially demonic secrets, it was nothing to write home about. Apart from the fact that it was one of the first features to incorporate dialogue in the Esperanto language, which didn’t sit well with native speakers.
Once the film wrapped, though, tragedy haunted it at every turn. In the year of its release, Milos Milos, who played the titular creature, killed his wife and shot himself dead. Ann Atmar, who played Shatner’s sister, committed suicide several weeks after principal photography wrapped. Several years later, co-star Elois Hardt’s daughter was kidnapped and murdered.
As for Shatner, he never saw Incubus because he doesn’t watch his own work, but he still felt its wrath. As he explained, when he was sitting in his makeup chair on the Star Trek set, “A rock came crashing through the window.” He picked it up, and he noticed that it came attached with an ominous note.
“Reading it, I was greeted with the words, ‘You’re next, Shatner! The Esperantists!'” he recalled. “The note went on to explain that the Esperantists were angry they weren’t consulted during the course of the film, and ‘ticked off’ they hadn’t been invited to the premiere. Either way, they decided to curse Incubus and anyone who laid eyes on the film.”
With the movie having already been plagued by misfortune, Shatner vowed to do everything in his power to wipe it from the history books, albeit at his own pace. “I took it upon myself to destroy every copy of Incubus I could find. During a hiatus from the show,” he added. “I wasn’t going to rush into this one. I mean, how evil can the Esperantists be?”
No more threats were made on his life, and he even suggested that “fluent Klingon speakers are a bit more of a handful” than the Esperantists who pledged to add his name to the list of Incubus alumni who were beset by tragedy. Nonetheless, he must have been aware that, at the very least, it was an eerie coincidence that it had done so much to earn its ‘cursed’ label.
