Vibe
Benjamin Christensen combines illustrated lecture, historical reconstruction, grotesque fantasy and skeptical social commentary in an investigation of witchcraft and superstition. Devils, sabbaths and torture scenes coexist with attempts to explain how fear and misogyny shaped accusations. The film’s strange form is part of its Halloween power. It can shift from diagrams and demonstrations to elaborate infernal tableaux without warning, making the viewer unsure whether they are watching scholarship, exploitation, satire or nightmare. Christensen himself appears as the Devil, giving the staged sequences an unusually mischievous theatricality.
Watch for
- The film moves between illustrated lecture, historical reenactment, miniature work and grotesque fantasy. Its instability of form is central to the experience.
- Benjamin Christensen’s own performance as the Devil is theatrical and often comic, complicating the idea that the film simply believes the superstition it depicts.
- Look at the handmade models used to visualize cosmology and witchcraft. The educational apparatus can be as uncanny as the dramatized scenes.
- The final modern section reframes earlier persecution through medicine and psychology, making the film’s argument more skeptical than its sensational imagery initially suggests.
Production notes
BFI identifies Häxan as a 1922 Swedish film written and directed by Benjamin Christensen and lists an 82-minute running time. The film’s hybrid documentary-fiction form should also be preserved rather than simplifying it to conventional narrative horror. Its preservation history matters because Häxan has circulated in materially different forms. Later presentations can carry different narration, music and runtimes, so any discussion of length or soundtrack should identify the version being described.
Trivia
- Benjamin Christensen wrote and directed the 1922 Swedish production.
- BFI lists an 82-minute version, while later reissues differ because narration, score and editing were altered.
- The film combines documentary explanation with staged historical and supernatural scenes rather than following a single continuous fictional plot.
Legacy
Häxan remains singular even within silent horror because it combines scholarship, dramatization, grotesque fantasy and skepticism without settling into one form. Its images of sabbaths, demons and persecution predate familiar Hollywood witch iconography, while its critique of superstition and institutional cruelty keeps the film intellectually unstable rather than merely antiquarian.