Director: Benjamin Christensen
year: 1922
Haxan is at its core a documentary of Witchcraft and the Inquisition. Danish film-maker Benjamin Christensen told the history of witchcraft and the inquisition at times using what can best be described as slide show presentations combined with dramatizations with the title cards used to narrate. When the film was later developed for American audiences and titled Witchcraft Through the Ages in the 1960's a narrator's voice over is used to describe the content. Haxan is divided into 7 chapters.
The first chapter is a lecture using paintings, drawings, woodcuts and models to relate the beginnings of the superstitions and history of demons, witches and Hell.
The film then dramatizes a number of vignettes regarding the superstitions. We see a witch preparing a concoction of toads and snakes when a local woman approaches her for a love potion.
The witch tells her the brew would need to be made of "Cat feces and dove hearts boiled in the moonlight". Another vignette depicts body snatchers and then a number of dramatizations take place showing interactions with the Devil.
"So it happens with witchcraft as with the devil; peoples belief inhim was so
strong that he became real. The devil is everywhere and takes all shapes. He shows
himself as a nightmare, a raging demon, a seducer, a lover and as a knight."
Some of these dramatizations included Satan enticing a woman out of her bed, black mass rituals including witches kissing Satan's ass, and one depicting a witch giving birth to a brood of demons after succombing to Satan. (This long before Rosemary's Baby)
Another acted out scene showed two witches putting a curse on a home by pulling up their skirts, urinating into bowls and then throwing the urine on the doors of the house.
The next chapters deal more with the inquisition during the middle ages and the abuse of power by the Roman Catholic Church. Finally the movie concludes by showing the modern day scientific explanations for persons who in an earlier time would have been called witches but then condemns the modern day practices of placing many of those individuals in nursing homes and lunatic asylums.
Christensen is attempting to show that Witchcraft was mere superstition and those accused of participating in it were misunderstood. His argument though isn't supported by the dramatizations. What the film has going for it most is style. The images in the vignettes are truly frightening and at times disgusting even shocking by today's standards.
For an excellent review of the film go to:
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