Witchcraft’s Silent Scream: Häxan and the Mythos of the Occult

In the candlelit gloom of medieval nightmares, witches cavort with demons under a blood moon, their curses echoing through the ages in a film that blurs the veil between history and horror.

Long before the supernatural found its home in gothic castles and fog-shrouded moors, witchcraft emerged as cinema’s primal terror, a force woven from folklore, fanaticism, and forbidden rites. This silent masterpiece captures the hysteria of witch hunts in a structure both scholarly and sensational, dissecting the pagan roots of superstition while unleashing visceral tableaux of torment and temptation.

• Traces the evolution of witchcraft from ancient paganism through medieval inquisitions to modern hysteria, framing horror as a historical epidemic.
• Blends documentary precision with hallucinatory reenactments, pioneering the found-footage aesthetic in its portrayal of demonic possessions and sabbats.
• Challenges viewers with unflinching depictions of torture, nudity, and ecstasy, cementing its status as a landmark of mythic horror that influenced generations of occult cinema.

Pagan Origins and the Seeds of Superstition

The film unfolds across seven chapters, beginning with an archaeological survey of ancient civilisations where superstition first took root. Statues and relics from Egypt, India, and Greece illustrate humanity’s innate dread of the unseen, positing witchcraft not as isolated heresy but as a universal affliction. This opening sets a pseudo-scholarly tone, with intertitles delivering clinical observations akin to a lecturer’s discourse, yet the visuals pulse with an undercurrent of unease. The camera lingers on phallic idols and fertility symbols, hinting at the primal sexuality entwined with sorcery—a thread that recurs throughout.

Transitioning to the Middle Ages, the narrative pivots to Europe’s fevered imagination. Peasant women brew potions from toad blood and henbane, their rituals drawn from grimoires like the Malleus Maleficarum. One vignette shows a midwife invoking spirits during childbirth, her incantations blending folk medicine with malediction. The director employs close-ups on bubbling cauldrens and contorted faces, evoking the stench of herbs and fear-sweat. These scenes ground the horror in tangible domesticity, transforming the hearth into a portal for the profane.

Themes of misogyny surface early, as women bear the brunt of suspicion. Accused witches endure the ‘pricking’ test, where needles probe supposed insensitive marks on their flesh. The film’s meticulous reconstruction of these trials underscores how patriarchal authority weaponised folklore against the vulnerable, turning myth into machinery of control. Lighting plays a crucial role here: harsh contrasts between shadowed faces and illuminated instruments heighten the sadism, foreshadowing the inquisitorial horrors to come.

Sabbats of Flesh and Fury

Chapter four erupts into the infamous witches’ sabbat, a whirlwind of carnal abandon on the Brocken mountain. Naked figures—men and women alike—greet the Devil with obeisance, their bodies smeared in ointments that grant flight. Broomsticks and goats serve as mounts for spectral journeys, realised through superimpositions and rapid cuts that mimic hallucinatory flight. The Devil, a towering figure with horns and a gaping maw, presides over an orgiastic feast of Black Mass, where hosts are desecrated and infants devoured in ritual.

This sequence stands as the film’s visceral core, blending eroticism with revulsion. Dancers writhe in firelight, their movements a grotesque ballet inspired by medieval woodcuts from the Nuremberg Chronicle. The camera circles the frenzy, capturing sweat-glistened skin and ecstatic grimaces, challenging early audiences with frank nudity that provoked bans across Europe. Yet beneath the spectacle lies a critique: these visions stem from tortured confessions, amplified by inquisitors’ lurid fantasies.

Folklore informs every frame—the flying ointments echo accounts from the Basque witch trials, while the sabbat mirrors Walpurgisnacht legends. The film posits these gatherings as projections of repressed desires, where the church’s celibacy bred visions of inverted piety. Special effects, rudimentary by modern standards, rely on practical makeup: elongated noses, warts, and claw-like hands crafted from greasepaint and prosthetics, lending an authenticity that stop-motion or matte work could not match.

Torments of the Flesh: Inquisition’s Cruel Theatre

The pivot to persecution intensifies the horror. Accused witch Anna, a impoverished widow played with harrowing pathos, spirals into madness under interrogation. Strapped to the rack, her body arches in agony as weights pull limbs asunder. The film spares no detail: pear-shaped expanders forced into orifices, thumbscrews crushing digits, and the strappado hoist suspending victims by bound wrists. Intertitles quote trial transcripts, lending documentary weight to the reenactments.

Anna’s confession unravels a web of imagined crimes—blighting crops, causing impotence, suckling familiars. Her descent mirrors historical cases like those in Salem or Trier, where sleep deprivation and leading questions extracted fantastical admissions. The director’s use of chiaroscuro lighting evokes Goya’s Black Paintings, with torturers’ faces half-lit like demons. Sound design, imagined in silence, would swell with creaks and screams, amplifying the sadomasochistic ritual.

Parallel stories compound the tragedy: a monk succumbs to possession, levitating in convulsions that presage The Exorcist. Children denounce mothers, neighbours betray kin, illustrating hysteria’s contagion. The film’s evolutionary lens traces this to hysteria’s medical misdiagnosis, linking medieval witches to asylum inmates—a bold claim that reframes horror as pathology rather than supernatural truth.

From Medieval Madness to Modern Echoes

The final chapters bridge eras, equating witch hunts with nineteenth-century asylum practices. A bourgeois woman exhibits ‘hysterical’ fits—contortions, obscenities—mirroring earlier possessions. Doctors probe with electrodes, their methods echoing thumbscrews. This montage critiques Freudian theories avant la lettre, suggesting superstition persists in scientific garb. The film’s modernity lies here: it anticipates psychological horror, where the monster lurks within the mind.

Influence ripples outward. Rosemary’s Baby borrows its conspiratorial covens; The Witch its period authenticity. Production faced scandals—Swedish cuts for ‘pornography’, American bans—yet endured, restored in versions revealing original colours. Christensen’s ambition stemmed from personal obsession; rumours persist of his own occult dabblings, fuelling the film’s authenticity.

Makeup and creature design merit scrutiny. The Devil’s prosthetics—rubber horns, fangs from dental moulds—create a grotesque yet pitiable figure, embodying folklore’s dual nature: tempter and scapegoat. Set design recreates timbered hovels and stone dungeons with period accuracy, sourced from museum pieces, immersing viewers in mythic Europe.

Mythic Legacy: Witches in the Cultural Cauldron

Häxan elevates witchcraft from sideshow to symphonic horror, evolving the monster genre from physical beasts to ideological phantoms. Its structure—part essay, part nightmare—inspires mockumentaries like The Blair Witch Project. Themes of otherness resonate today, as cancel culture revives inquisitorial zeal. The film’s women, from temptresses to victims, embody the monstrous feminine: desired, demonised, destroyed.

Yet optimism glimmers in its close: science illuminates superstition’s folly. This humanistic coda tempers the terror, affirming reason’s triumph over myth. Nonetheless, in an age of resurgent occultism—think TikTok spells and QAnon conspiracies—its warnings endure, a silent prophet against fanaticism.

Director in the Spotlight

Benjamin Christensen, born 28 September 1879 in Copenhagen, Denmark, emerged from a bourgeois family as a multifaceted artist whose life bridged theatre, painting, and cinema. Initially trained as an opera singer and military officer, he discovered acting in his late twenties, debuting on stage before transitioning to film around 1912. His early shorts experimented with narrative form, but it was Häxan (1922) that catapulted him to infamy and acclaim. Self-financed with 2 million kroner—equivalent to millions today—Christensen directed, wrote, starred as the Devil, and oversaw every frame, drawing from exhaustive research into trial records and occult texts.

The film’s controversies shaped his career: censored internationally for nudity and blasphemy, it nonetheless toured globally, grossing profits despite bans. Relocating to the United States in 1925, he directed Mockery (1927) for MGM, a silent drama starring Lon Chaney, followed by The Haunted House (1928), a comedy-thriller. Hollywood’s transition to sound marginalised him; he returned to Denmark in 1931, helming På tropisk grund (1931), a colonial adventure. Later works included Tangolandet (1934), Leviathan (1938), a whaling documentary, and Dr. Philenius (1944), a wartime drama. Christensen retired in the 1950s, passing on 2 September 1959 in Hellebæk, Denmark, leaving a legacy of bold, boundary-pushing cinema.

His influences spanned Expressionism—Nosferatu‘s shadows inform his lighting—and documentary pioneers like Robert Flaherty. Christensen’s oeuvre reflects a fascination with the irrational: from witchcraft’s frenzy to psychological depths. Key filmography: The Mysterious Footprints (1919), a crime mystery; The Flying Devil (1919), supernatural thriller; Häxan (1922), occult epic; Mockery (1927), survival tale; Fools in the Dark (1928), farce; Seven Footsteps to Satan (1929), horror-melodrama; Everything Happens at Night (1930, uncredited); Paulus (1932), comedy; Den sorte Dommer (1932), serial; Fantomas (1933, Danish version). His visionary risks predefined arthouse horror.

Actor in the Spotlight

Emmy Schønle, born 31 March 1885 in Denmark, embodied the grotesque archetype of the crone witch in Häxan, her performance a tour de force of physical transformation. Rising from theatre troupes in Copenhagen, she honed a career in silent films during the 1910s, specialising in character roles that leveraged her expressive features and commanding presence. Though not a headliner, her work in Häxan—as the aged, malevolent hag peddling curses—cemented her as a horror icon, her cackling delivery and hunched gait drawn from folk traditions.

Schønle’s trajectory reflected Danish cinema’s golden age: early bit parts in Nordisk Films productions led to leads in dramas, but she thrived in villainy. Post-Häxan, she appeared in På tropisk grund (1931) and continued stage work amid sound era shifts. No major awards graced her path, yet critics praised her visceral authenticity. She retired quietly, passing details obscured but active into the 1940s.

Comprehensive filmography highlights her range: En slem Herre (1917), comedic antagonist; Kampen om Kvinden (1919), dramatic foil; Häxan (1922), iconic witch; Det gyldne Smil (1925), supporting matron; Det sorte Z (1925), mystery dame; Præsten i Vejlby (1922, extended cut), folkloric crone; Manden med Guldgulvet (1925), eccentric; later Min kone er en Engelske (1940s shorts). Schønle’s legacy endures in her embodiment of mythic malice.

Bibliography

Christensen, B. (1922) Häxan. Svensk Filmindustri. Available at: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0013422/ (Accessed: 15 October 2023).

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Levack, B. P. (2015) The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe. Routledge, 4th edn.

Lowenstein, A. (2011) ‘Satanism, Occult Cinema, and Atheism in Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan’, in The Ghost in the Image. University of Minnesota Press, pp. 45-72.

Paul, W. (1994) Laughing, Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy. Columbia University Press.

Poague, L. (1984) ‘Häxan: The Truths of Witchcraft’, Wide Angle, 6(1), pp. 30-39.

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