Häxan (1922)
Overview
Grave robbing, torture, possessed nuns, and a satanic Sabbath: Benjamin Christensen's legendary film uses a series of dramatic vignettes to explore the scientific hypothesis that the witches of the Middle Ages suffered the same hysteria as turn-of-the-century psychiatric patients. But the film itself is far from serious-- instead it's a witches' brew of the scary, gross, and darkly humorous.
Cast
Benjamin Christensen
Devil
Ella La Cour
Karna, Sorceress
Kate Fabian
Old Maid
Oscar Stribolt
Fat Monk
Astrid Holm
Anna
Karen Winther
Anna's Sister
Elith Pio
Johannes, Witch Judge
Aage Hertel
Witch Judge
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CinemaSerf
Next time you look around and wonder where all the sparrows have gone, just be thankful you didn't live in a time where their bodies were pulverised to make a potion to ward off evil spirits! That's just one of the examples cited in this interestingly whacky look at all things devilish and malevolent. It's not the most rational of tours of the witching sorority, but it does by the end of the sixth chapter converge on quite a potent evaluation of the absurd, the terrifying, the superstitious and the religious and quite successfully demonstrates the plethora of overlapping philosophies, manipulative strategies and just plain scaredy-catness of mankind's behaviour when faced with things unknown and unpredictable. The rudimentary augmentation of human bodies with wings, horns, hooves - all illustrated here using quite an entertaining mixture of what looks like ancient scripture, coupled with some silent film footage and plenty of plasticine shows it wasn't just the uneducated classes who bought into all of this mysticism. It's accompanied by some quite pithy and informative, discursive even, inter-titles that try to balance between the silly and the serious and some of the characterisations are genuinely quite thought-provoking, especially as the church was often a prime mover in causing and/or dealing with the consequences of these fevered and violent old wives' tales. I can't say I could make sense of all of it, but I think that might have been auteur Benjamin Christansen's point as he opens a Pandora's Box and let's us do the heavy sifting. One man's witch is another man's nun!
