Häxan (1922) Review: The Century-Old Film About Witchcraft That Still Cannot Be Classified

EXHIBIT LABEL — GALLERY 7, CASE 14

Object: Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages Origin: Sweden / Denmark, 1922 Medium: 35mm silent film, tinted and toned, 104 minutes Creator: Benjamin Christensen (1879–1959), Danish filmmaker, actor Acquired: From a world that no longer knows what to do with it Classification: Pending

Curatorial Note:

This object resists classification. It has been catalogued under documentary, horror, educational film, and experimental cinema. None of these designations are adequate. The object is all of them simultaneously, which means it is none of them individually.

Please do not touch the glass. What is inside has been known to touch back.

Description (Part I — The Lecture):

The film opens as a scholarly presentation. Title cards cite sources. Woodcuts and engravings from the medieval period are displayed, carefully photographed, with annotations. Christensen shows you what people in the Middle Ages believed about witchcraft, demonology, and the structure of hell. He presents cosmological diagrams. He identifies the devil in manuscript illustrations. He is thorough. He is serious. The footnotes are real footnotes.

If the film had continued in this mode, it would be a curiosity. A well-made educational film from 1922, interesting for its craft, forgotten by everyone except historians.

The film does not continue in this mode.

Description (Part II — The Reenactments):

Christensen begins to dramatize. At first, the reenactments are restrained. Scenes of medieval life. Women accused of sorcery. The accused brought before inquisitors. Title cards still provide scholarly context. The tone is still academic.

Then something shifts. The reenactments become vivid. Then lavish. Then ferocious.

A witches’ sabbath is staged with full sets, costumes, and effects that rival anything produced in the silent era. Women kiss the backside of a devil played by Christensen himself, in full demonic makeup, grinning with a joy that is not entirely in character. Babies are stolen. Potions are brewed from actual ingredients the title cards helpfully identify. Monks are tempted. An old woman confesses under torture, and the confession scene is played with such commitment that you cannot tell whether Christensen is condemning the inquisitors or thrilled by the spectacle of their cruelty. Both. Neither. The film vibrates between those positions and refuses to land.

The production design is extraordinary. Christensen spent nearly two years shooting Häxan. He built enormous sets. He choreographed sequences of demonic ritual with the precision of a ballet and the energy of a bacchanal. The devil presides over banquets, dances, acts of sacrilege. The witches fly. The monks sweat. The flames are real flames.

No one in 1922 was making films like this. Nosferatu was released the same year and is rightly famous for its visual daring. Häxan is more daring. It is longer, stranger, more expensive, more explicit, and more genuinely difficult to categorize than anything its contemporaries attempted. It was banned in the United States. It was censored in multiple European countries. It has never been entirely domesticated.

Description (Part III — The Argument):

Here is where the exhibit becomes difficult.

Christensen’s thesis, stated plainly in title cards, is that the women accused of witchcraft in the Middle Ages were suffering from what we would now call mental illness. Hysteria. Compulsion. Somnambulism. He argues that the Church tortured confessions out of vulnerable women, and that the confessions were symptoms, not evidence.

This is a progressive argument for 1922. It is also, by contemporary standards, an incomplete one. The equation of female deviance with pathology has its own problems. The film is aware of some of them and unaware of others. But what makes Häxan peculiar is not the quality of its thesis. It is the relationship between the thesis and the images.

Christensen says: these women were sick, not evil. Then he shows you the sabbath scenes again, and they are so alive, so intoxicating, so committed to the reality of what they depict, that the scholarly frame cracks under their weight. The lecture says the witches were not real. The images say the witches were magnificent. The film cannot reconcile these positions. It does not try. It holds them both, side by side, and lets the tension do the work.

This is what separates Häxan from a documentary with dramatic reenactments. In a documentary, the reenactments serve the argument. In Häxan, the reenactments devour the argument. They are too beautiful, too excessive, too delighted with their own darkness to function as illustrations of a rational thesis. They become the thing they are supposed to be explaining away.

Description (Part IV — The Modern Section):

In the final chapter, Christensen brings the discussion to the present day. He shows modern women exhibiting symptoms that would once have been called witchcraft. Sleepwalking. Kleptomania. Nervous episodes. He films them in hospitals and clinics, with the same clinical eye he used for the medieval woodcuts at the start.

Then he does something remarkable. He puts the devil makeup back on. He appears, in modern dress, grinning into the camera, as if to say: I am still here. The devil is not medieval. The devil is not historical. The devil is whatever name you give to the thing you cannot explain, and you will always have things you cannot explain.

The lecture has circled back to the beginning, but it is no longer a lecture. It is a confession by the filmmaker that his own film has outgrown his thesis. He set out to explain witchcraft rationally and instead made the most irrational, ecstatic, and ungovernable film about witchcraft ever produced.

Conservation Status:

The original nitrate prints were damaged. Multiple versions circulate. A 1968 re-release, narrated by William S. Burroughs over a jazz score, exists as an entirely different object with the same images. The Criterion Collection has restored the 1922 version.

The object remains unstable. Not physically. Conceptually. Every attempt to fix it under a single classification has failed. It is a documentary that does not behave like a documentary. It is a horror film made forty years before the genre had a name. It is a lecture that catches fire halfway through and never puts itself out.

Condition Report:

Over one hundred years old. No signs of deterioration. If anything, the object has become more volatile with age. The scholarly arguments have dated. The images have not. The devil still grins. The sabbath still burns. The women still fly.

Every decade finds new reasons to exhibit this object, and every decade fails to write a label that contains it. This label has also failed. The object remains unclassified.

Please do not touch the glass. The glass is no longer there.

Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages — Directed by Benjamin Christensen. Sweden / Denmark, 1922. 104 minutes.