'Häxan' Movie Review
Benjamin Christensen made the most expensive Scandinavian silent of its era, cast himself as the Devil, and accidentally invented the essay film. Critics hated it. Censors banned it. A century later it still feels feral.
Most films from 1922 feel like museum pieces. Häxan feels like somebody is about to get arrested.
It's a Swedish-Danish silent horror essay that has no business being this strange this early. Benjamin Christensen, a Danish director with a thing for the macabre, decided his third feature would be a "cultural-historical lecture" on witchcraft. That sounds dry. It is not dry. It is grave robbing and possessed nuns and a witch's Sabbath where Satan churns butter with his bare hands while women line up to kiss his backside. In 1922.
Why You Should Actually Watch This
Because nobody since has had the nerve.
Häxan opens like a lecture. Woodcuts, a pointer, Christensen breaking down medieval cosmology like a stern professor with a slideshow. Then the second chapter starts and the film just goes feral. He stages dramatic re-enactments of medieval witch trials with the iconography of Hieronymus Bosch and the patience of a man who genuinely believes he has four years to make whatever he wants. (He did. Filming alone took from February through October 1921.) The thing slides between documentary and fever dream and pamphlet without warning. Modern critics call this the essay film. In 1922 there was no name for it because nobody had done it yet.
It also happens to be a quasi-feminist film, which is the part that surprises people. Christensen's argument across seven chapters is basically: the women burned for witchcraft were probably suffering from what 1920s psychiatry called hysteria, and the institutions confining them in 1922 are uncomfortably close to the ones that burned them in 1500. He ends the film on that comparison. It lands harder in 2026 than he could have known.
The Cast (And The Director Who Cast Himself As Satan)
Christensen plays the Devil. Personally.
He shows up horned and hoofed, scaly, with a tongue doing things tongues should not do. He is clearly having the most fun a director has ever had on his own set. He designed the look after Bosch's hellscapes, which means the Devil in this film has the specific, leering grin of a 15th-century woodcut come to life. The cameo is one of the most brazen director appearances in cinema and it doubles as a thesis statement about who is actually running these images.
The performance that stays with you, though, is Maren Pedersen as the old woman Anna who is tortured into naming her neighbours. Pedersen wasn't a trained actress. Christensen apparently cast her off the street, and there's a much-cited anecdote where she turned to him between takes and said, in earnest, that the devil was real and she had seen him sitting by her bed. Whether you believe the story or not, you can see something in her face that no professional was going to give him. Clara Pontoppidan and Tora Teje round out the cast — both of them serious stage actresses, both lending the film the legitimacy Christensen needed to get away with everything else.
Behind The Scenes: One Carousel, 75 Witches, A Plane Engine
The witches-take-flight sequence is the one everyone remembers.
To shoot it, Christensen and cinematographer Johan Ankerstjerne built a model town with roughly 250 miniature houses, each about six feet tall, mounted on a giant carousel turned by twenty men. They filmed seventy-five witches separately, with an actual airplane engine pointed at them to whip the clothes around. Then they composited the two using an experimental optical printer Ankerstjerne built himself. There were no special effects departments in 1921. There was just Christensen deciding what he wanted and engineering it from scratch.
This is also why the film bankrupted its production company. It cost somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million Swedish kroner, which made it the most expensive Scandinavian silent film ever produced at the time. Svensk Filmindustri gave Christensen total artistic freedom and never recovered the money. Christensen and Ankerstjerne shot only at night or on closed sets to keep the picture's dark hue consistent, and scandalous rumours circulated in Copenhagen about what was happening inside that studio after dark. He wrote, decades into his career, that Häxan was the only film he ever made exactly as he wanted, with no interference. You can feel that in every frame. Restraint is not the operative word.
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The Weak Link
The final chapter.
Christensen draws his big parallel between medieval witches and modern hysteria patients, and the science he is working from is, unsurprisingly, very 1922. There is a long stretch suggesting that women's "delusions" of being visited by the Devil are now just delusions of being visited by celebrities or their own doctors. The intent is sympathetic. The execution lands somewhere between condescending and accidentally damning. Watching it now, knowing how women have actually been treated in psychiatric institutions across the last hundred years, the coda is more disturbing than the torture scenes that came before it. Whether that is a bug or a feature depends on how generous you are feeling toward Christensen.
Things To Look Out For
The cuts in the torture sequences. Censors hacked the film up everywhere it played outside Sweden and Denmark. The closeup of the finger being snapped off a hanged man's hand. The trampling of the cross at the Sabbath. The demon embracing a nude woman. Closeups of thumbscrews being applied. All cut for decades. Most are restored now in the Swedish Film Institute prints. Knowing those frames were once illegal makes them hit differently.
Watch for Christensen's own arm in frame. He physically reaches into one shot to help an actress try out a thumbscrew. He keeps inserting himself, as the Devil, as the lecturer, as the hand on the instrument. The whole film is partly an argument about how a director and an inquisitor are doing the same job to the same body. Critic Chris Fujiwara made this point and it is hard to unsee once you do.
And if you can find both versions, watch the Sabbath scene with the 1922 score and then again with the 1968 re-release. That cut, retitled Witchcraft Through the Ages, is narrated by William S. Burroughs over a jazz score featuring Jean-Luc Ponty on violin. The original is haunted. The Burroughs version is hallucinatory. They produce two completely different films from the same footage.
A century in. The witches still fly. The Devil still grins. Somebody should do this again.
Nobody will.