ABCs of Horror 3: "H" Is for Häxan (1922)

Paste’s ABCs of Horror 3 is a 26-day project that highlights some of our favorite horror films from each letter of the alphabet. The only criteria: The films chosen can’t have been used in our previous Century of Terror, a 100-day project to choose the best horror film of every year from 1920-2019, nor previous ABCs of Horror entries. With many heavy hitters out of the way, which movies will we choose?

Modern film audiences tend to see the word “documentary” and inherently expect a certain degree of dryness and dignity to follow. This is what the last few decades of filmmaking have instilled in us, an association of documentary filmmaking with the geeky and obsessive exploration of niche topics or “serious” issues, movies often made by filmmakers with personal axes to grind, educational aspirations or noble, altruistic intent. But “documentary” didn’t always have such a stolid reputation–tread back to the 1960s-1970s and there was a preponderance of so-called “mondo film” documentaries, essentially just exploitation films trading in sexuality or violence, under the guise of being theoretically educational. Go back a little further, and the “nudist” films of the 1950s and 1960s are more or less the same gimmick, a wink-wink, nudge-nudge way to shoehorn female nudity past the censors through the vehicle of documentary. And if you go back far enough, you can’t help but notice some of the same parallels in the infamous, silent horror documentary known as Häxan, which purports to be nothing less than an authoritative history of the superstitions and stigma surrounding the practice of witchcraft from the medieval era to the “modern day.” And yet one wonders if even in 1922, titillation wasn’t considered a bit more desirable than “education.”

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Häxan, occasionally known as Witchcraft Through the Ages, which was its title during a 1968 U.S. reissue, is a singular film that challenged censors of its day just as much as any of the quasi-documentaries to follow. Director Benjamin Christensen doesn’t beat around the bush–he purports to present a historical documentary and surprisingly progressive warning against the demonization of women and abuse of “hysteria” patients, but he coats that message in such a disturbing layer of nightmare imagery/Satanic recreations that Häxan plays more like a true horror film than a documentary in the first place. It can make for a genuinely disturbing watch, more than 100 years later, because there’s iconography in Häxan that grabs hold of you and refuses to let go. Puffy-cheeked devils with long tongues lolling lazily out of their mouths. Naked men and women crawling and cavorting in circles of demons, lining up to literally kiss demonic asses. Scenes of torture straight out of Albrecht Dürer woodcuts or Divine Comedy illustrations. The grainy, lo-fi black and white only makes Häxan more otherworldly to watch today—it feels like some kind of bleak Satanic relic that humankind was never supposed to witness. In some respects, it’s arguably more off-putting to a modern audience than it would have been to one in 1922, because it feels more alien.

And yet, the sense of projected intellectual superiority Christensen revels in here does feel oddly familiar to all too many modern documentaries as well. He based the film at least partly on his own studies of the 15th century Malleus Maleficarum, the infamous “hammer of witches” document that was used as justification/textbook in witch trials/hangings/burnings for the next several centuries, but he approaches the topic with a “modern” detachment that he seems to believe is the hallmark of what is now a more civilized age. “Look at the ridiculous things these people used to believe,” Häxan seems to say. “Obviously we wouldn’t abuse anyone this way now, we’re too enlightened for that.” Religious viewers of its day didn’t much care for Häxan either, particularly the way that Christensen applied pop psychology to suggest that womanly “hysteria” was a more likely culprit for demonic incursions of the past than actual demonic possession.

Of course, we now can’t help but look back at Häxan with some of the exact same arrogance that Christensen was displaying toward his own subjects, who lived centuries before his time. It’s the inevitable separation that the gulf of history creates between “us” and “them,” the intrinsic difficulty of putting oneself into the shoes of artists making a satirical documentary mocking religious extremism some 102 years ago. Our time is almost certainly not as different from theirs as we would like to believe–one glance around the fringes of the internet is enough to see that this is no doubt the case.

Still, what lingers from Häxan today, more than anything else, is the simple power of its unsettling imagery, costumes and the inherently eerie cinematography of Satanically themed footage captured five years before the genuine arrival of the first “talkie.” It would be years before cinema audiences would hear their first recorded scream in a horror film, but here they could queue up to watch men and women take turns smooching the plump derriere of Satan himself. If that’s not educational, then I can’t imagine what would be.

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter for more film writing.

ABCs of Horror 3: “H” Is for Häxan (1922)