Streaming Availability: Public Domain
Häxan is a 1922 film from Denmark, so it is of course, silent. More curiously, it's a documentary, written in a style akin to a video essay. Its hour forty minute runtime is divided into various acts of evidence and argument that lead to a conclusion. The director, Benjamin Christensen, speaks in the first person in the text. We're not grading this film as a five paragraph school assignment, however. We're looking to see what kinds of scares are at play here and there are plenty. If you're a garage band and need some free spooky B-roll for your music video, Häxan is an invaluable resource of cool imagery.
The impressive thing about Häxan is its extremity for the time. Most of the hardcore features of exploitation films do not become common until the Sixties. That's when taboos recede and technology increases to really show off gore. A lot of horror movies before then are (let's be honest here) rather boring and dull to us 21st century folk. Silent films are an even harder adjustment. But Häxan is not slow, even at 105 minutes, which is an epic length for this era. It's full of fantastic sights, intense horrors, and quite a few naked asses. Christensen is putting on a great show of special effects and nightmarish visuals to decorate his essay.
Which kinda leads me to my suspicion here. Was Benjamin Christensen really out to make a non-fiction history piece? I'm sure he actually was fascinated by medieval mysticism and witch-hunting manuals, specifically the Malleus Maleficarum. But his interest is mostly in the lurid details, the exploitation potential here. A non-fiction pretense gives you a lot more liberty to depict all the gross horrors of witchcraft and medieval torture practices. And even then, Häxan was controversial in its time, which was relatively liberal in filmmaking circles. (By the 1930s, a movie like this would be unimaginable to release.) Variety Magazine in 1923 called it "absolutely unfit for public exhibition". To which I say, Hell Yeah.
Witchcraft is a perfect subject for exploitation. You win both ways in terms of horror. You can film both the outrageous fantasy of the Satanists and their Sabbaths. And then you can film the other side, with the barbaric and depraved methods used by the clergy and the state to root out witches.
For me though, the joy in Häxan is not the opening slideshow of old manuscripts or the Kafkaesque nightmare of church justice. (Or even stunningly erotic fascination with whips.) It's when this movie stops really being about any argument at all and just wallows in the grimy wonders that is Satan and his works. Benjamin Christensen is so under Satan's thrall that he actually plays him in the movie. He's as a naked hairy barrel-chested man constantly flicking his tongue in a rather Metal display. I love all the demons in Häxan, from the adorable little stop-motion Baphomet to the host of costumed freaks climbing out from under an old woman's dress as she gives birth to them. The shots are dark and full of texture. This rules. All these images are timeless, even without accompanying sound. They're very cute now but still have power.
Häxan tries to have its cake and eat it too in terms of witchcraft history. "People's belief in him [Satan] was so strong that he became real", admitting that there is no Devil. Yet it kinda admits to some actual magical practices. Also it shows so much detail to the dark arts in sophisticated special effects that you might forget you're seeing what the movie says is pure fantasy. Audiences in 1922 would probably be too terrified by the imagery to notice much of the subtlety here.
To be clear: there were no medieval witches. Nobody was worshiping Satan in the 1980s, nobody was worshiping him in the 1480s. All of it was paranoia, and thousands died for nothing. The inquisitor, Heinrich Kramer, who wrote the Malleus Maleficarum was - to put it bluntly - fucking nuts. He was so sexually obsessed with an Innsbruck woman who dared challenge him that the local bishop had him kicked out. Witches are fun, black Sabbaths seem like a great way to spend the evening, the visions of Hell even in Häxan are delightful, but none of it happened. There is not even evidence of much surviving folk Paganism in Western Europe at this point.
Häxan exaggerates the death toll by the witch hunts claiming eight million murders which would be preposterously high even in 1922's scholarly consensus. Today the figure is a (still horrible) 60,000 or so. Still the film is accurate with its awful collection of torture instruments. We do not see many of them used, but their mere implication makes Häxan something akin to the great-great-grandparent of the torture porn sub-genre. From Heinrich Kramer we get Saw's John Kramer.
There is a feminist conclusion in Häxan. Christensen notes that the medieval injustices against women have only evolved into modern injustices. He sees how scientific theory explains the behavior of witches psychologically, but also how modernity has conjured its own forms of torture. Women are called "hysterical" and locked away in terrible conditions. So even in an age without Satan, evil persists. And well, Christensen would live to see how right he was. Häxan is only a generation ahead of the Second World War when that eight million death toll would be far more accurate, and psychiatry would play a terrible role in promoting euthanasia on the path to mass-genocide. Fifty years later, bunk science of memory regression would conjure up our very own witch hunts in the Satanic Panic.
But that kind of nightmare does not have a big Satan with his tongue out. It's not fun. Häxan, however, is a great opening to our month of demons. We have so much more devilry to come in many more forms.
Next Time! Just one more silent movie, I promise you. It's the German Expressionist blockbuster, Faust.
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