Häxan (1922)
Blending lecture-hall documentary segments with lavishly staged dramatizations, this Swedish-Danish silent film traces European witch-hunting from medieval superstition through the asylums of the 1920s, arguing the two were never as different as claimed.
Benjamin Christensen spent nearly two years and one of the largest budgets in Scandinavian silent cinema on Häxan, and cast himself as a leering, tongue-wagging Satan — vivid enough that the film was banned in several countries for its torture scenes and nudity alone.
Background
Häxan was directed by the Danish filmmaker Benjamin Christensen, who spent roughly two years and one of the largest budgets in Scandinavian silent cinema on the production. The film mixes lecture-style documentary segments with lavishly staged dramatic recreations to trace the history of European witch-hunting, from medieval superstition through to what Christensen argued were comparable forms of hysteria and confinement in the asylums of his own time. Christensen himself plays a leering, theatrical version of Satan in several of the dramatized sequences.
What to watch for
Watch for the elaborate staging of the witch-hunt and torture sequences, vivid and explicit enough that the film was banned in several countries on release for its depictions of torture and nudity. The film’s blend of documentary argument and horror-film imagery was unusual for its time and has made it a subject of continued interest to both film historians and horror fans, who often watch it as an early ancestor of the horror documentary hybrid.
