Michael Draine's Twisted Vista
Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages
Criterion DVD $39.95
The legendary Scandinavian film Häxan (“The
Witch,” 1922) brings life to a medieval world
of superstition and fear with such searing
intensity as to force a reassessment of the
power of silent cinema. Häxan’s unflinching
images of the terrors of the Inquisition linger for
years after a single viewing.
Producer/writer/director Benjamin Christensen
(1879-1959) undertook two years of research in
preparation for this film, drawing incidents
from the Malleus Maleficarum, (The Witches’
Hammer, 1487) a witch-hunter’s manual of
unparalleled paranoia and cruelty. A filmmaker
well in advance of his era, Christensen
harnessed scientific curiosity with an
unerring affinity for the irrational workings of
the subconscious.
Employing a fragmented narrative that the
director characterized as “a mosaic,” Häxan
(pronounced hek-sen) blurs the line between
historical fact, dramatization, and fantasy.
(Paul Hammond’s essay, “Some Surrealist
Advice,” in  The Shadow and Its Shadow,
commends Häxan as an example of surreal
cinema.) Christensen apparently reveled in
artifice, performing both the roles of Satan
and Christ.
Häxan begins as an illustrated lecture on
superstition, then interleaves stories of two
accused witches with harrowing visions of
the practice of witchcraft. It’s left to the
viewer to determine if the infernal imagery is
to be interpreted as the fearful imaginings of
superstitious characters, or actual events
within the reality of the film. For example,
an accused old hag’s confession of consorting
with the Devil is clearly a desperate attempt
to survive the Inquisition; yet Christensen’s
depiction of midnight revels are so vivid
they read as flashbacks.
Christensen’s subversive, anti-authoritatarian
sensibility extends to the narrative under-
pinnings of the film. Christensen first
draws contrasts between medieval ignorance
and modern knowledge, then indicts the
viewer's complacency by tracing parallels		Music Review Index
between medieval idea of demonic possession
and contemporary attitudes toward mental
illness. The film’s final sequence moves
to the current day, proposing the retro-		Twisted Cinema
active diagnosis that accused witches
suffered from the same “hysteria”
which Freud treated.
Christensen presents the Church as a force
for ignorance that inflicted death and
torture upon countless innocents. While
his stringent condemnation of religious
persecution bespeaks skepticism,
Christensen at one time proposed the
institution of a research lab for studying
psychic phenomena.
Häxan is in some respects a transcendent
example of the exploitation film, which
presents sensational subject matter within a
putative educational context. In a fascinating
introduction Christensen filmed for a 1941
rerelease, the director appears wearing a
white lab coat. Like the producers of the
first films depicting the ravages of venereal
disease and drug addiction, Christensen had
an agenda of social reform (which included the
movement to modernize care for the mentally
ill, which at that time in Denmark had fallen
under the purview of the Church).
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