Häxan: The 1922 Documentary-Horror Hybrid

There is a moment near the start of Häxan when the film seems to be a rather dry lantern-slide lecture. A pointer moves across medieval woodcuts. Intertitles cite sources. A scholarly voice, in effect, walks you through pre-modern cosmology and the machinery of the witch trial. And then, without warning, the lecture dissolves and the screen fills with something else entirely: a coven flying across a night sky, demons with lolling tongues, a Sabbath of the damned lining up to kiss the Devil’s backside, and the director himself, Benjamin Christensen, cavorting through it all as a leering, capering Satan. A hundred and two years old, and it still lurches from the seminar room into the nightmare with a force that most modern horror cannot manage.

Häxan — the Swedish word for the witch — was made in Denmark and Sweden and released in 1922, and it remains one of the strangest things ever committed to celluloid. It was, at the time, among the most expensive Scandinavian films ever produced, and every krona is on the screen. Christensen spent it on elaborate sets, meticulous period detail, and effects work — flying, transformations, torture apparatus — of a sophistication that still reads as accomplished a century on. It is an essay-film, a documentary, a horror picture and a piece of anti-clerical polemic all at once, and it belongs to no genre because it more or less predates the genres it would go on to influence.

Seven chapters, three films in one

Christensen structured the film in seven parts, and the structure is the key to its ambition. The opening chapter is genuine non-fiction — an illustrated history lecture on how medieval and early-modern Europe understood demons, hell, and the cosmos, built from real woodcuts, engravings and manuscript illustrations. It is patient, sourced, almost academic. Christensen had done real research; he leaned heavily on the Malleus Maleficarum, the notorious fifteenth-century witch-hunters’ manual, and the film wears its reading openly.

The middle and longest movement abandons the lecture for full dramatisation. Here Christensen stages the life of a superstitious medieval community: an old beggar woman accused of witchcraft, the inquisitors who torture a confession out of her, the hysteria that spreads as the accused start naming others to escape the rack. These sequences are staged with astonishing texture — grimy, candlelit, teeming with faces Christensen cast for their strangeness — and shot through with hallucinatory Sabbath scenes that visualise the fantasies the accused were tortured into describing. This is the horror film proper, and it is genuinely disturbing, because Christensen refuses to draw a clean line between the imagined demons and the real cruelty inflicted by the Church in pursuit of them.

The final chapter delivers the thesis, and it is a bold one for 1922. Christensen argues that the women burned as witches were, in many cases, the mentally ill, the elderly, the neurologically afflicted — people his own era would diagnose with hysteria or send to a clinic. He cuts between a medieval witch and a modern woman exhibiting the same “symptoms,” and asks whether the shower-bath of the psychiatric ward is truly more humane than the stake. It is a genuine piece of argument, delivered through montage, and it lands the film somewhere between horror and social critique.

Why it still works

The craft that keeps Häxan alive is Christensen’s command of tone-shifting. He understood, decades before the vocabulary existed, that the collision of registers — the sober lecture abutting the delirious nightmare — produces an unease that neither register could generate alone. The documentary opening earns your intellectual trust; the horror sequences then exploit that trust, so that the demons arrive with the authority of fact behind them. You have been told this is history. Now history is dancing with the Devil in front of you. The whiplash is the whole effect.

The visual invention is the other reason it endures. Christensen and his cinematographer, Johan Ankerstjerne, used tinting, superimposition, stop-motion and in-camera trickery to render the supernatural — witches soaring over rooftops, coins turning to filth, a demon churning butter in a farmhouse — with a tactile, handmade weirdness that CGI has never recaptured. The Sabbath sequence in particular, with its queue of the damned and its capering devils, has a genuinely blasphemous energy; you can feel Christensen relishing the chance to stage the forbidden imagery the Church spent centuries suppressing. He plays the Devil himself, tongue out, eyebrows working, clearly having the time of his life, and that authorial glee is transmitted straight to the viewer.

There is also the faces. Christensen filmed real elderly women, weathered and toothless, in the roles of the accused, and their reality — the same documentary impulse that Tod Browning would push further a decade later — gives the torture sequences an unbearable weight. When the old woman on screen weeps under interrogation, the wrinkles are real, and the horror lands as something closer to reportage than melodrama. Christensen understood that a face carries evidence a costume never can. He filled the frame with genuine age and genuine strangeness, and let the camera dwell long enough that you stop watching a performance and start watching a person, which is precisely when the torture becomes intolerable to sit through.

The two lives of the film

Häxan has had two distinct existences, and a collector should know both. The 1922 original ran around a hundred and five minutes as a silent picture with orchestral accompaniment. It was censored and banned in numerous territories — the United States among them — for its graphic torture, its nudity, and its frank contempt for the Church. For decades it circulated in compromised, cut versions.

Then, in 1968, it was reborn for the counterculture. A shortened version, retitled Witchcraft Through the Ages, was released with a spare jazz score — featuring the violinist Jean-Luc Ponty — and, most famously, a dry, sardonic English narration read by the Beat writer William S. Burroughs. This version played the art houses and midnight circuits, and it is how a great many later viewers first met the film. Burroughs’ cadaverous drawl over Christensen’s medieval torments is an inspired anachronism, and it recruited Häxan into the underground canon it has belonged to ever since. Both versions are legitimate; the silent original is the fuller work, but the Burroughs cut is a genuine cult artefact in its own right.

The lineage it began

For the collector, Häxan is a headwater, and its influence runs down two channels. The first is the entire tradition of witch-horror. Every serious film about the witch-hunt owes something to Christensen’s insistence that the real horror lies in the persecution as much as in the supernatural. That argument runs straight into the modern folk-horror revival; you can watch it worked out with tremendous rigour in The Witch and the Puritan nightmare, Robert Eggers’ film, which shares Christensen’s fanatical period detail and his refusal to say plainly whether the Devil is real or merely the shape a community’s dread assumes.

The second channel is the documentary-horror hybrid itself — the whole idea that you can stage the uncanny with the authority of non-fiction. That gambit, of pointing the camera at real, unsettling human material and framing it as spectacle, reaches its most notorious flowering in Freaks and the 1932 film that ended a career, Tod Browning’s picture, which, like Häxan, was banned for daring to show the audience something it could not comfortably classify. Both films use the real to make the horror unanswerable.

There is a third, tonal cousin worth naming for anyone chasing the mood: the painted, theatrical dread of the great Japanese ghost films, where the supernatural is staged as formal spectacle rather than jump-scare. Christensen’s Sabbath and the lacquered nightmares of Kwaidan and Kobayashi’s ghost stories as painted theatre share a conviction that the way to film the otherworldly is to build it by hand, frame by frame, and let its artifice become part of its terror.

The verdict

Häxan is a masterpiece of a peculiar, one-off kind, and it is genuinely watchable in a way that most century-old films are not. It is by turns dry, delirious, funny, blasphemous and morally serious, sometimes within a single reel, and it never resolves into a shape you can file away. That instability is the point. Christensen built a film that argues about the past while embodying the very fantasies the past was punished for, and the tension between the two has not slackened in a hundred years.

Watch it and you understand something about horror’s origins: that the genre began entangled with the documentary, the essay and the polemic, and that its oldest subject is the mob that hunts the monster, and only secondarily the monster itself. Christensen knew that in 1922. Much of the century since has been spent catching up to him.

Where to see it: the Criterion edition presents both the full silent version, with a period-appropriate score, and the 1968 Burroughs-narrated cut, so you can meet the film in both its lives. Watch the silent version first for the full argument, then the Burroughs cut for the delirium. This is essential viewing for anyone who wants to know where horror actually came from.