Häxan

Häxan is the 1922 Swedish-Danish silent horror essay film written and directed by Benjamin Christensen. Part documentary, part staged folklore study and part feverish nightmare, it examines witchcraft, demonology and the persecution of women through the Middle Ages, then links those fears to ideas about hysteria and superstition in the modern world. Its appeal lies in that unstable mixture of scholarship and spectacle: it is at once a history lesson, a lurid occult pageant and an early attempt to make horror feel analytical as well as transgressive.

The Film File

• Original release year: 1922
• Director: Benjamin Christensen
• Credited writer: Benjamin Christensen
• Principal cast: Maren Pedersen as the Witch; Clara Pontoppidan as the Nun; Elith Pio as the Witch Judge, also the Young Monk; Oscar Stribolt as the Doctor, also the Fat Monk; Tora Teje as the Modern Hysteric; John Andersen as the Chief Inquisitor; Benjamin Christensen as Satan; Poul Reumert as the Jeweller; Karen Winther as Anna; Kate Fabian as the Old Maid
• Approximate runtime: 105 minutes for the commonly circulated restored version, though surviving presentations vary
• Country or countries of production: Sweden and Denmark
• Relevant horror subgenres: occult horror, folk horror, historical horror, supernatural horror, pseudo-documentary horror

Behind the Screams

Häxan grew out of Christensen’s fascination with witchcraft trials, folklore and the psychology of fear. The film was made over several years and released in 1922 after a lengthy production period, which helps explain its hybrid shape. It is not a straightforward narrative feature, but a sequence of prologue, dramatized episodes, tableaux and argumentative intertitles that present witchcraft as both historical belief and cultural obsession. That structure is central to the film’s identity: Christensen is not merely staging witches, he is building an argument about why people imagined them.

The source material behind the film is broad rather than singular. Christensen drew on medieval and early modern witchcraft lore, ecclesiastical imagery, superstition, trial records and the popular occult ideas available to a 1920s audience. The film’s lecture-like passages about cosmology, possession and hysteria give it an explicitly interpretive frame, while the dramatized episodes show the material in action. It is this alternation between exposition and invention that makes the film so unusual. Rather than pretending to be objective, it makes its own thesis part of the spectacle.

One of the most important creative decisions was to treat witchcraft as a visual subject rather than only an abstract historical one. Christensen filled the film with grotesque practical effects, bodily humour, diabolic pageantry and images of persecution that are designed to be both instructive and disturbing. The result is unusually tactile for a silent-era film. It also explains why the movie was controversial on release: its nudity, blasphemy and sadistic imagery were considered shocking, and censorship affected its circulation outside Scandinavia. What survives today is the film’s reputation as much as its original scandal, but the scandal was very real.

There is also a modern-angle section in which Christensen links old witch beliefs to contemporary ideas about nervous illness and hysteria. That material matters because it stops the film from becoming simply an antiquarian curiosity. It is interested in continuity, not just period reconstruction. The director’s own appearance as Satan is another revealing choice. It underlines the film’s theatrical self-awareness and its taste for provocation, but it also fits the larger project: the film is not hiding behind neutrality. It is a performance of interpretation.

Into the Dark

The film opens in a quasi-educational mode, explaining old beliefs about the universe, the devil and the machinery of temptation before moving into dramatized scenes of witchcraft and persecution. From there, it develops into a series of linked episodes about women accused of sorcery, the rituals they are said to perform, and the social panic that follows. One extended strand follows an old woman accused of witchcraft and subjected to interrogation and humiliation, while another moves through convent life, temptation and possession. The film is less interested in plot momentum than in cumulative dread, building a chain of examples that show how fear spreads through a community.

What gives the film real shape is the way it shifts between belief systems. On one side are the authorities, inquisitors and learned men who claim to understand what witchcraft is. On the other are the women, monks and ordinary figures caught up in desire, guilt, fear and suggestion. Christensen repeatedly blurs the line between literal supernatural events and psychological disturbance, which is why the film still feels recognisably modern. Its witches are not only monsters in the folkloric sense; they are also products of social suspicion, bodily anxiety and moral panic.

Spoilers ahead: the following paragraphs discuss major plot developments.

As the film progresses, the so-called evidence of witchcraft becomes more and more intertwined with cruelty and projection. The accused woman is tortured into confessing, and the film links the mechanics of persecution to the fantasies of those doing the accusing. The “modern” segment then sharpens the point by suggesting that what medieval people called possession can resemble symptoms of illness, repression or extreme suggestion. In effect, the film argues that witch hunts are built on misread human suffering. That matters because it turns the horror away from demonology alone and towards institutional violence, making the authorities as frightening as the devils they claim to fight.

The ending reinforces this idea by collapsing distance between past and present. Rather than leaving witchcraft sealed safely in the Middle Ages, Christensen insists that the mentality behind it persists in altered form. The final effect is less a neat resolution than a warning: fear, credulity and punishment can reappear under new names. That is one reason the film remains more than an antiquarian curiosity. It is a horror film about how societies manufacture evil by misunderstanding bodies and behaviour.

What Gets Under Your Skin

Häxan is most effective when it embraces contradiction. It is scholarly without being dry, lurid without losing its thematic focus, and fantastical without surrendering its interest in real social harm. The atmosphere comes less from a conventional haunted-house mood than from a sense of intellectual unease. You are always aware that the film is asking you to look at images and decide what they mean, which is part of what makes it so memorable. Horror here is not just a matter of jump scares or shocks. It is the unsettling collision of rational explanation and irrational cruelty.

The visual design does a great deal of the heavy lifting. Christensen uses expressive staging, grotesque masks, infernal pageantry and arresting special effects to make witchcraft look materially present, even when the film is clearly adopting a historical or satirical stance. The Sabbath scenes, in particular, are full of sacrilegious spectacle that feels half comic and half obscene. Elsewhere, the film shifts into scenes of imprisonment, torture and public accusation that replace fantasy with human brutality. That contrast is one of its strongest assets: the supernatural imagery is striking, but the persecution is often more disturbing because it feels socially organised rather than magical.

The performances suit that approach. They are stylised in the manner of silent cinema, but not merely theatrical for the sake of it. Maren Pedersen’s Witch is earthy and wry, while Clara Pontoppidan and Tora Teje give the film a sense of divided feminine experience, moving between innocence, repression and collapse. Christensen himself, playing Satan, adds a slyly mischievous note that keeps the film from becoming solemnly academic. The cast often has to bridge two modes at once, surviving both the lecture frame and the drama, and that balancing act is one of the film’s quiet achievements.

Sound is, of course, not part of the original silent presentation in the way it would be for a later horror film, but modern screenings can alter the experience substantially through accompaniment. Even so, the film’s basic emotional register does not depend on any one score. Its power lies in visual rhythm, in the sequence of unsettling images and in the way meanings are constantly being recast. The result is a horror film that feels unusually intelligent about fear. It does not treat superstition as quaint background decoration; it shows superstition as an engine of social harm and imaginative excess.

If there is a limitation, it is that the film’s essay-film structure can feel abrupt or uneven to viewers expecting a single sustained storyline. That is not a failure so much as the cost of its ambition. Christensen is trying to cover history, theology, persecution, bodily anxiety and modern psychology in one work, and the transitions can be deliberately rough. For the right viewer, that variety is part of the pleasure. For others, it may make the film feel more like a brilliant compilation of ideas than a seamless narrative.

The Film’s Afterlife

Häxan has a strong reputation today, but that was not simply guaranteed by its age. Its early reception was mixed in the sense that a film so provocative inevitably caused controversy, yet it also drew admiration for its originality. Later restorations and wider distribution helped secure its standing as one of silent cinema’s landmark horror works. It is now often discussed not just as an early witchcraft film, but as an unusually daring hybrid of documentary impulse, historical pageant and surreal horror imagination.

Its influence is easiest to trace in the way later filmmakers and critics talk about witches, persecution and the blending of education with spectacle. The film is frequently cited in discussions of folk horror and in accounts of horror cinema’s prehistory because it treats superstition as both subject and style. Even where later films do not imitate it directly, they often echo its basic insight: witchcraft stories are rarely just about witches. They are also about institutions, desire, repression and the stories societies tell themselves about blame.