The effects and design are insane for the time, and hold up surprisingly well even for today. But far more interesting to me now is the message. The powers of suggestion, mass belief, and fear are so incredibly strong.

denmark, 1922, swedish

BENJAMIN CHRISTENSEN


Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages

This is one of those rare times on this journey through cinema history where I’ve actually already seen the film before. In this case, I’m not sure when exactly I first watched this, but I definitely rewatched it in 2012, because my Letterboxd tells me I did. 2012 is a few years before I started this project and it’s therefore a fascinating window into the ways in which I’ve changed over the years.

My slender review back then doesn’t seem to engage much with the substance of the film. Rather I was taken by the trappings. This is a ridiculous movie on the surface. The effects are absolutely over the top, and would be considered decent for 2025, let alone 1922 when it was released. Satan, played by the director himself, is legitimately super creepy and everything feels surprisingly modern. Even the intertitles feel like they could have almost been written today.

But none of that is what is sitting with me after watching it this time. The point of this film was to compare the suffering of women in the Middle Ages to the suffering of women in the contemporary time Christensen was living. Where there were once “witches” who were burned at the stake and tortured, there were now “hysterical women” who were locked in institutions, tortured, and sometimes lobotomized. From the perspective of Christensen, little had really changed.

That was 103 years ago as of this writing. Things have improved I’d say. We certainly aren’t suffering from the subjective power of nervous “hysteria”. That’s good. We don’t lobotomize people or use electro shock therapy. That’s also good. But we do still do basically the same set of things to women we’ve always done. These days it’s just canceling through social media, ostracizing, body shaming, sexuality shaming, and all the rest of it.

Would these same men and women, but let’s be honest mostly men, be calling these women “witches”, if this was still the Middle Ages? I think it very, very likely. So, on the one hand, yay for progress. We aren’t murdering people in quite the same terrible way we used to. On the other hand, we still have a long way to go before we get rid of the underlying evil that caused it.