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| The original release poster. |
It’s been almost a century since the release of Häxan, Danish writer/director Benjamin Christensen’s well-researched semi-documentary. Christensen divided his film into seven sections, and some are more entertaining than others. The first section is a slideshow lecture of images of fabulous beasts and fantastic scenes, a pointer highlighting details with helpful narration (“The devils are stuffing the damned into large pots.”). In the last section Christensen shifts to modern times and comments on the roles of disability and mental illness in marking people as witches in the past (“Isn’t superstition still rampant among us?” could as well be said of the 2020s as the 1920s).
In between, Christensen highlights the brutality of the Inquisition, but Häxan is best-known for the grotesque scenes of Satanic rites conjured up by those forced into false confessions. A witch with bubbling brew replete with toads and snakes prepares a potion of “cat feces and dove hearts boiled in moonlight”. A lurid, leering devil (played by Christensen himself, with gusto) pops up to tempt the innocent. A witches’ Sabbath is full of cavorting fiends and obscene rituals straight from the Malleus Maleficarum (one of Christensen’s primary sources). There’s more than a touch of humor in some of these sequences.
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| Looks like fun... |
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| Maybe not... |
Many versions of Häxan have been released, including one narrated by William Burroughs with a jazzy score, which I would recommend avoiding. In the more traditional format, much of the film is still worth seeing.
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