Incubus Mythology...What is an Incubus?

In today's pop culture heavy society, the market has been recently saturated with vamipres, werewolves, and the like. Back a few decades, movies with Bella Lugosi and Nosferatu were considered the best monster movies to lend some thrills to your Saturday evening. Frankenstein prowled the box offices and much more recently, cult classics like Interview with the Vampire, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and Lost Boys stole (and ate) our hearts. And Twilight...how could we forget about the pop culture phenomenon, The Twilight Saga that beat out the box office records for Titanic?


So, with our nightmares being completely taken over with mythologies most romanticized and beloved monsters, what's left?
We know what makes a vampire kill, a werewolf howl, and a reanimated corpse terrorize - but mythology that human kind has created over the years to shock our systems has a lot more to offer. There are many more forgotten monsters hiding in the dark.
So let's pose this question: What is an incubus? And no...we don't mean the band. What in actuality is an incubus?
If you look up the definition on wikipedia is states:

An incubus (from the Latin, incubo, or nightmare; plural incubi) is a demon in male form supposed to lie upon sleepers, especially women, in order to have sexual intercourse with them, according to a number of mythological and legendary traditions. Its female counterpart is the succubus. An incubus may pursue sexual relations with a woman in order to father a child, as in the legend of Merlin.^[1] Some sources indicate that it may be identified by its unnaturally large or cold penis.^[2] Religious tradition holds that repeated intercourse with an incubus or succubus may result in the deterioration of health, or even death.




Sounds sort of raunchy, huh?

But if you go a little more in depth with your research, you will also find that common incubus myth also suggests that they are spirits or demons that sustain themselves on the life and energy of human beings simply by being around them and through the sensation of touch.
This idea is just a bit or acceptable when writing a PG-13 rated film, don't you think? In the film, The Incubus (www.theincubusfilm.com) coming to select theaters this September, a small coven of incubi (pl for incubus) stumble on the small town of Spoon River to not only seduce its human citizens for fun, but eat their souls as well. But when one of the citizens, Marnie Rose, falls in love with one of the incubi, it can result in a relationship that might just be a little abusive.


So what do you think? Vampires suck blood, Werewolves eat flesh, and Incubi...well...they steal your soul. A pretty bad monster to forget within the volumes of ancient world mythology? We think so.