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.

Nosferatu- Film and Live Score Review

I have been a film aficionado for a long time. My father brought me up on classics like David Lean's adaptations of Oliver Twist and Great Expectations as well as the various black and white classic comedies of Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy. However, I became interested in cult TV series and films whilst attending University. Our campus was media-centered and as a result it had a huge catalogue of videos to rent, free of charge; I ploughed through many often taking the maximum 8 out at a time and consumed them voraciously.

As a result, I believe I am quite literate in films and TV but Nosferatu, the German Expressionist masterpiece is like the Rosetta Stone. Over 100 years old and nearly obliterated from history, this masterpiece still haunts my dreams with its otherworldly imagery. I've seen it on film and DVD at home lots of times but never on the big screen. A chance to see it on the big screen at my local theatre was too good to pass up. Throw in a live score and it was a must watch for me, so I quickly booked a ticket for just myself... this was a bit too niche for even my wife who still hadn't forgiven me dragging her to the Werner Herzog documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams over 10 years ago in Cambodia.

So, on a cold, dark Monday night I descended on the Teignmouth Pavilion, wondering what the audience would be like. I picked up my ticket and saw that there was a small group of about 30 people with the average age of 60. I was one of the youngest member in the audience apart from a couple of teenagers who came along with their elders.

The film itself is a masterpiece of early cinema, mixing humour like, 'She has a beautiful neck,' when Orlok sees a picture of Ellen (a Mina Harker-a-like) or when we see Orlok using his powers to carry the coffins onto a carriage before using his powers to get the horses to gallop, to full on dread like when Orlok rises from the coffin in the ship and the crew are slowly picked off. When the title card read, ‘The ship of death had a new captain,’ and I saw Orlok on the ship, which was slowly moving forward under his evil influence, it sent shivers down my spine.

All through this, the music by Chris Green enhanced the experience and offered a new way to appreciate the hundred year old movie. As the blueish tint gave way to a yellow hue it felt ethereal on the big screen. I have had a copy of the dvd at home since the late 90s but that had a different musical track so seeing this new soundtracked version certainly was a boon.

Overall, I loved the experience and hope that many more events like this come to our local pavilion theatre; it's a way for people to appreciate old classics and brings the media to a new audience.