‘We no longer burn our old and poor. But do they not often suffer bitterly?
Häxan is often mentioned as one of the best horror films of the silent era, but, in reality, it’s a tough one to classify. Even though it’s more unsettling than any other film from this era (and I include Nosferatu, Caligari, Phantom and anything else you want to throw at me), it is more of a video essay than a narrative horror film. It’s also astonishingly good…
Written, directed and starring Danish filmmaker Benjamin Christensen, Häxan (Danish for ‘The Witch’), is part documentary, part dramatisation and all subversive and weird. The film is ostensibly a visual history of witchcraft and the occult, but with a surprisingly progressive take on the treatment of women, and how one man’s ‘witchcraft’ is another man’s ‘hysteria’. The film concludes by drawing a chilling comparison between women being burnt at the stake during the witchtrials and women being locked up in asylums for being ‘hysterical’ in the modern era.
What makes Häxan so compelling, however, is the visceral quality of the sinister tableus that Christensen (who also plays the devil in the film) presents us with. They are sickening and shocking and often downright bizarre. I should caveat this by pointing out that my own Catholic upbringing makes me more susceptible to witchcraft and the occult, and so there were moments here that I found to be genuinely troubling. The classical score and use of centuries old paintings and artwork only makes Häxan more weirdly timeless – like it is something that has always existed. And it is this primal energy that gives the film its undoubtable power. I felt like I was watching some kind of insidious lost media. The kind of thing you find on an old, unlabelled VHS tape in some old guy’s loft.
Häxan is a genuinely unique cinematic experience that got under my skin in a way that no other silent film ever has. It’s the kind of film that I immediately want to watch again. I might make it my whole personality for a month or so. I just can’t shake the damn thing.
