Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922)
Directed by Benjamin Christensen

Film Review

In 1922, the esteemed Danish film director Benjamin Christensen achieved worldwide notoriety and acclaim (in roughly equal proportion) with his most ambitious film, Häxan (a.k.a. The Witches or Witchcraft Through the Ages).  Part documentary, part lurid visual fantasy, the film was made for Svensk Film on a budget of two million kronor, the most expensive silent film made in Scandinavia.  With its unflinchingly graphic depictions of medieval torture, satanic rituals and sexual perversion, Häxan aroused instant controversy and was banned in many countries.   For many years, the film was seen outside Sweden only in a 77 minute long truncated version, but even in its heavily censored state it manages to be a provocative and totally enthralling piece of cinema.

It is only comparatively recently that Häxan has been widely available in its original version.  In its unexpurgated form, the film offers such repulsive delights as gargoyle-like demons feasting on unchristened babies, witches kissing the rear end of Old Nick himself, and some chillingly matter-of-fact accounts of mutilation practised by professional witch tormenters of the 15th century.  Christensen was a reasonably accomplished actor as well as a director (he subsequently played a leading role in Carl Theodor Dreyer's Mikaël, 1924), so who better to portray the Devil than Christensen himself?

Whilst the film certainly has plenty of shock value and deserves its reputation as one of the classic horror pieces of the silent era, it is also endowed with an abundance of humour, of the deliciously black variety.  After a dry academic dissertation (consisting of stills that are likely to be found in any textbook on witchcraft) the spectator is treated to a succession of imaginative vignettes illustrating the supposed activities of witches and their persecution by the Church, the horror sweetened with more than a smattering of dark comedy.  In one sequence, an oversexed old maid is desperate to ignite the libido of a monk she has taken a fancy to, so she visits her local witch, who promptly offers her a potion made from doves' hearts and cat poo.  Later on, a toothless senior citizen is enjoying some hospitality when she is dragged away and given the full 'confess or be burnt' treatment; she claims a sweet revenge by denouncing the cruel minxes who denounced her.  Despite the bleakness of the subject matter (a large chunk of which was gleaned from Malleus Maleficarum, a handbook for 15th-century witch hunters), Christensen has a knack of teasing out the lighter side.  The middle portion of Häxan may be a shocking spectacle of gore and demonic perversion, but it is compulsive viewing, deliriously funny in places.

The pièce de résistance is the last of the seven segments that make up the film, a thought-provoking coda which attempts a 20th century rationalisation of the phenomenon of the witch.  Christensen points out that while there are no witches today (TV game-show hosts excluded, of course) there are still individuals who are feared and persecuted by society.  We lump them all under the banner of 'mentally ill' and lock them away in institutions, where they may be subjected to degrading forms of treatment which are not too dissimilar from medieval torture.  Christensen's thesis is that these unfortunates were the very same people who, in more primitive times, were mistaken for witches.   We are left with the sobering thought that perhaps very little has changed since the Middle Ages.  True, we've managed to kick the habit of roasting old ladies on the village green, but we still carry with us an irrational fear for that which we do not understand, and a willingness to reject and persecute those who do not conform to our notion of normality.  Witches have haunted us for millennia, and we seem strangely reluctant to let them go...

Film Synopsis

For hundreds, if not thousands of years, witches have predominated in folklore, these being the likely instigators of all the ills and mishaps that afflict mankind.  Accounts of witchcraft in medieval times are legion, and how easy it must have been to attribute some disease or other unexplained phenomena to the workings of malign influences.  No wonder men of the Church were so ruthless in hunting down and persecuting witches.  It was for their own good that these servants of the Devil, mostly poor old women, should be made to confess or else burned alive.  Of course, no one believes in witches today.  And yet there are still people who are shunned by society and ill-treated - those afflicted with mental disorders.  Can it be that these unfortunates were what our ancestors mistook for witches...?