Häxan (1922)

The longer review

Häxan is a hard film to describe. Its Swedish subtitle calls it a cultural-historical lecture in moving pictures, in seven sections, and it does open like a lecture: medieval woodcuts and diagrams of the cosmos, with a pointer tapping the images. If you came for horror, the first ten minutes will test you.

Then Christensen starts staging the history. We see a witch's kitchen, an old woman accused of sorcery and interrogated by monks, a convent overtaken by hysteria, and a Witches' Sabbath at night. Christensen himself plays the devil, a leering, tongue-flicking figure with horns who pops up beside sleeping women and at the edge of the frame. These scenes are imaginative and sometimes grotesque, with makeup and puppetry that look handmade in a way that adds to their strangeness. Some of the imagery was considered too much for audiences of the time, and it was censored in several countries.

What lifts the film is its argument. Christensen keeps returning to the cruelty of the witch trials and the way fear spread through whole communities. In the last section he jumps to the 1920s and suggests that many women once burned as witches would, in his day, be diagnosed with mental illness. Parts of that thinking are dated, but the anger at the persecutors is clear.

It's uneven. The lecture sections are slow, and the shifts in tone are jarring. It's also unlike anything else from its era, and the staged scenes have a power that sticks.

Before you watch

The full-length restored version runs about 105 minutes. A 1968 re-edit called Witchcraft Through the Ages, with a narration and a jazz score, is a different and much shorter cut, and it's still under copyright.