Classic Corner: Haxan — Crooked Marquee

Between F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu and Robert J. Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, 1922 was a bellwether year for horror and documentary features. One film that bridged the gap between them – staking out its own territory in the process – is Häxan, Danish writer-director Benjamin Christensen’s exploration of the history of witchcraft and the superstitious beliefs that gave rise to Europe’s witch hunts of the Middle Ages. Funded by Sweden’s Svensk Filmindustri (which had previously backed 1920’s The Parson’s Widow, directed by Christensen’s fellow Dane, Carl Theodor Dreyer, and Victor Sjöström’s The Phantom Carriage), Häxan was the result of two and a half years of research and a protracted shoot carried out mostly at night in Christensen’s private studio under conditions of utmost secrecy. In light of its arcane subject matter and meticulously realized visuals, it’s hardly surprising Christensen didn’t want to let the proverbial cat out of the bag until he was ready to spring it on audiences.

And spring Häxan did when it premiered in Stockholm on September 18, 1922. With its scenes of women lustfully cavorting with grotesque demons and copious, if tasteful, nudity, the film was an immediate sensation, but Christensen was interested in more than mere titillation. Billed as “A cultural and historical presentation in moving pictures in seven parts,” the film opens with a rundown of the beliefs of people in the Middle Ages regarding witches and Satan worshipers, illustrated with vintage woodcuts, many of which Christensen would skillfully recreate with sets and actors. The dry, lecture-style mode doesn’t last long, though, as the second part contains its first dramatic scene, set in the home of a witch in 1488 (significantly, the year after the publication of the infamous Malleus Maleficarum, the book that sparked Christensen’s interest in the subject). It also introduces one of Häxan’s signature images: the director himself as the Devil, with long claws, horns, and a perpetually wagging tongue. Christensen’s Devil is an intimidating (if faintly ridiculous) sight, and along with the other infernal beings that pop up throughout the film, boasts impressive makeup that holds up a full century later.

The longest sustained stretch of narrative is the 40 minutes in the middle (making up parts three to five) wherein Christensen depicts a typical witchcraft trial from beginning to end, showing how many individuals are ensnared by a single accusation. When a printer’s sudden illness is attributed to a poor old woman, she’s reported to the town’s inquisitors by his hysterical wife and carted away. She steadfastly insists she’s not a witch, but buckles under torture and gives her tormentors the names of at least half a dozen others in the course of confessing to giving birth to demons (one of the film’s most amusing sights) and witnessing the sorts of things witches were believed to do at the time. (If you’ve ever wanted to see a coven of witches queue up to kiss a demon’s backside, Häxan is the film for you.)

These scenes provoked one contemporary Danish newspaper to write, “The film seems itself a product of the beastliness, torture, bonfires, and insanity that it means to critique.” Another accused Christensen of allowing “his considerable abilities to lead him into this blind alley.” If he did, however, it was to shed light on the brutal methods those in power used to keep the marginalized under their thumbscrews. Also raising their dander was the film’s sixth part, with its convent of nuns gone wild half a century before Ken Russell’s The Devils, and return appearances by Christensen’s Devil and the indomitable inquisitors. It’s only in the finale, and the leap to the present day, that Christensen breaks Häxan’s spell, bringing in then-current psychological theories and using “hysteria” as a catch-all to explain why certain women were singled out for such harsh treatment.

Following Häxan’s release, Christensen moved to Germany to make films at UFA and was eventually lured to Hollywood, where he followed the lead of Paul Leni’s The Cat and the Canary by directing a trilogy of “old dark house”-style films, including the deliriously entertaining Seven Footprints to Satan. As for the filmmakers who followed in his footprints, some who borrowed from Häxan (consciously or unconsciously) include Jacques Tourneur (Night of the Demon), Terence Fisher (The Devil Rides Out), Ridley Scott (Legend), Stuart Gordon (The Pit and the Pendulum), Rob Zombie (The Lords of Salem), and Robert Eggers (The Witch). Meanwhile, Häxan itself gained a second life a decade after Christensen’s death when it was trimmed down to 76 minutes, overlaid with a jazz score and narration by William S. Burroughs, and released as Witchcraft Through the Ages in 1968, the year of Michael Reeves’s Witchfinder General. While there’s nothing supernatural about Reeves’s film, it has enough in common with Christensen’s to make plain how far ahead of his time he was.