A Visit From the Incubus (2001)

A Visit from the Incubus
Written, Directed, and produced by: Anna Biller (also, costumes, sets and editing by Anna Biller)
Featuring: Anna Biller, Jared Sanford, Natalia Schroeder, Gerald 'J.J.' Johnson, and Joe Babicki
26 minutes, 2001
www.lifeofastar.com

A Visit From The Incubus is a slightly misleading title. Anna Biller's monstrously creative and funny short film is mostly about what happens after the incubus pays a visit to Miss Lucy McGee, a chaste young woman living in the Old West in the late 1800's. Lucy, feeling violated and rather un-virginal after the incubus (a sex demon) ravishes her night after night, decides to take a familiar, and yet surprisingly constructive and nearly feminist stance against her rape, and ends up coming out a winner. Biller's wild taste and eccentric attention to detail makes Visit a theatrical experiment n color, costume, style, and genre. Also, it is sort of a horror film. I mean, Incubi and all. Anna Biller, dramatist and independent filmmaker, has a reputation for making films and writing plays that involve a creative edge a notch above even the most decisively 'artistic' independent projects...

Anna Biller wrote, directed, produced, and totally creatively controlled this entire film. Everything from the costumes to the sets to the makeup was overseen by hers truly, and the consistency of the styles is immediately apparent. Everything from the acting to the camera lenses, to the colors of the backgrounds are completely a mockery of 1940's and 50's Western films, with some references to the worst of the Hammer Horror Collection. Lucy (probably named after her Victorian counterpart in Bram Stoker's Dracula) is played by Biller herself, with a subtle humor and unfailing, deliberate, blandness. Natalia Schroeder is Madeleine, the best friend, who also has been a victim of nightly incubi visits. Together the girls share their shame at what has been done to them, but always in dialogue so trite and get gilded with double-meanings that it's impossible not to laugh. It's obvious that Biller did her homework for this film. The choreography, blocking, and camera angles are all directly stolen from the films she is mocking (and paying homage).

What is surprising is the message that this film seems s to carry; Though Lucy is defiled, she is also awakened, sexually. When she decides that she finally 'feels like a woman', she takes a job in the local saloon as a dance girl, a profession that would make an honest woman blush. The Incubus, her former terrorizer and rapist, follows her to the saloon and attempts to put together an act to compete with Lucy's. Lucy knocks him out of the water. It's Lucy's femininity that made her vulnerable to Incubus in the first place, but now she uses that femininity to gain the love of the audience and get Incubus thrown out of the saloon. Incubus becomes ineffective, impotent, and powerless to hurt her, or even tear down her confidence.

It's such a weird plot, but it's funny and really interesting. Biller is a funny and talented actress, and her knack for costumes and sets is truly commendable. This is one of the best-lit, best-designed films I have ever seen outside of Hollywood. The vintage Hollywood Technicolor costumes make the colors seem vivid and fantastical. It genuinely seems like something out of an old movie.

Biller has plans for another film coming out this year called Viva, based on ads and cartoons found in Playboy magazine throughout the decades. No doubt her ability to get the right 'look' no matter what decade, century, or film style, will carry through to Viva as well.