Häxan - Cult Film Review

I've always been intensely interested in people's beliefs, cultures and the resulting social structures - it's what drove me to pursue a degree in Anthropology at UEL all those years ago. So, when I heard of a silent film from the 1920s that looked into witchcraft and the hysteria surrounding it I knew I needed a piece of that. On a cold October evening, with a cup of tea and a pack of digestives at hand, I settled down to watch director Benjamin Christensen’s Haxan.

The film is a quasi-documentary, exploring the history of witchcraft and superstition from the Middle Ages right up to the 1920s, but it's really a hybrid: part academic lecture, part lurid horror film and part social commentary.

The film opens with an extended sequence that acts just like a historical lecture, using close-ups on images of woodcuts, paintings, and texts to explain medieval cosmology and demonology.

Christensen then leans into a serious, chapter-based presentation, complete with illustrations and diagrams, with utterly terrifying and graphic dramatic re-enactments. These vignettes depict everything from Satanic Sabbaths (with the director himself gleefully playing the Devil) to the brutal torture and confessions of the poor women accused of witchcraft. It’s a shocking, grotesque and unflinching look at the persecution of women and the instruments of torture used to extract their false confessions. It is terribly horrific how these women were treated and living life - being in constant fear of being accused on being a witch - must have been an incredible hardship. Apparently, these scenes made the film so terrifying that it led to it being heavily censored or banned in many countries upon release.

The film's final section is particularly intriguing from an anthropological perspective. It attempts to re-contextualize the alleged 'witchcraft' of the past through the lens of early 20th-century psychology, suggesting that many of the supposed witches were simply victims of mental illness, particularly the diagnosis of hysteria. While this comparison feels dated now, I appreciate that the director was seriously attempting to use contemporary scientific thought to understand historical human suffering and belief system through an effort to contextualise the culture and paranoia.

For a film made over a century ago, one of the most remarkable things about Häxan is how surprisingly modern its technique feels. It’s incredibly prescient; the mix of archival imagery with a guiding, didactic narrative voice (conveyed through intertitles and the occasional wooden stick pointer on screen) is strikingly similar to the style of a contemporary video essay you’d find online today - just obviously more low-key due to the technology available at the time. There are a variety of visual tricks and techniques used including reversing film footage, stop motion and some early animation to convey the information in interesting ways so the 1 hour 45 minute runtime whizzed by.

Watching this, I am reminded of the works of Adam Curtis, in that both use a vast array of historical source material and dramatic re-enactment to construct a compelling, often unsettling, argument about how historical forces (like religious fear and misogyny) shape our present.

Häxan is an essential watch in my opinion as, it's not just showing you facts; it's weaving them into a visually arresting, polemical argument with a definite point of view.

Overall, Häxan is a shocking, brilliant, and still-relevant piece of cinema that has stood the test of time and shows how little has truly changed in the century since its creation.