On 18 September 1922 a strange silent film premiered in Stockholm, Sweden. This dream-child of Danish director, screenwriter, and actor Benjamin Christensen was named Häxan, (translating as The Witch). Part educational documentary/part Grand Guignolesque exploitation drama, Häxan brought the horror of the historical witch craze to the screen in a beautifully grotesque fashion. Aesthetically, Häxan is a strange brew, reminiscent of the feverish paintings of Bosch and Bruegel, of mediæval woodcuts and the Romantic and Symbolist movements, but also the brooding theatrical menace of German Expressionist cinema and Neue Sachlichkeit art. Häxan is avantgarde, but not purely surreal, although its silence speaks of fevered imagination, superstition and neurotic psychology and is rich with bizarre imagery. It instead aims to anchor the witch-hunts and the beliefs that spawned them in historical and contemporary reality. It eschews a dry and dull delivery, presenting the fear and legends of witchcraft in a visionary tableau that, like the witch craze, has burned its presence into cultural history.
WAKING THE WITCH
Divided into seven chapters, Häxan begins with a slideshow lecture detailing the long history of belief in maleficent spirits such as the Daeva of Persia, Pazuzu the Babylonian personification of wild storms, and even Taweret, the Ancient Egyptian hippopotamus-headed fertility goddess. Though ancient cosmology is mentioned, the imagery was probably chosen for the entities’ weird appearance rather than any real association with witchcraft. The film does, however, inform us that the deities and benign spirits of older religions could come to be seen as devils and demons following the spread of Christianity.
Christensen worked on the film between 1919 and 1921, which coincides with Margaret Murray’s 1921 book . Murray suggests therein that some of the accused victims of the European witch trials of the Early Modern Period were devotees of a pre-Christian pagan cult that worshipped a Horned God (not The Devil). Christensen pays this theory no heed (if he was even aware of it – it doesn’t feature in his catalogued research) nor similar witch-cult theories of earlier writers such as Karl Ernst Jarke, Matilda Jocyln Gage and Charles Leland (which would later influence Gerald Gardner’s modern witchcraft religion, Wicca). In , the lord of the witches is the Christian Devil and the witch-cult is not pagan, but
