Häxan (1922) is the film that dressed a documentary impulse in demon makeup and refused to apologise for either half. Benjamin Christensen spent four years and an enormous budget by Scandinavian standards to adapt the fifteenth-century witch-trial manual Malleus Maleficarum into something that sits outside every category cinema had at the time. It's part illustrated lecture, part dramatised morality play, part body-horror spectacle. The result is one of the most genuinely strange objects in the history of the medium, and it holds up with a ferocity that most horror made a century later doesn't.
What Häxan actually is
The film opens with title cards and animated diagrams. Christensen walks the audience through medieval cosmology: the shape of the known world, the position of the planets, the hierarchy of demons. It reads like a university lecture. Then the dramatisations begin, and the lecture never quite recovers its composure. What follows is a series of vignettes depicting witch sabbaths, demonic pacts, inquisitors extracting confessions, and women accused of impossible crimes in a society with no framework for doubt.
Christensen himself plays Satan. He is not subtle about it. The performance is one of the most physically committed pieces of screen acting from the silent era: tongue flicking, eyes rolling, posture folded into something genuinely inhuman. He appears from trapdoors and behind sleeping women and inside the minds of accused heretics. This isn't horror as metaphor. Christensen wanted the audience to feel the medieval worldview from the inside, to understand exactly what a village woman meant when she said she had seen the devil, and exactly what the inquisitors thought they were doing when they tortured her for it.
The witchcraft sequences
The sabbath scenes remain extraordinary. Naked figures, animal masks, cauldrons, an infant being prepared for ritual use: Christensen stages all of it with a production designer's commitment and no apparent anxiety about what audiences might think. Swedish censors cut chunks. American distributors cut more. The version that circulated for decades was significantly shorter than what Christensen shot. The restored cut, running just over 100 minutes, lets the sabbath sequences breathe in a way that makes their lunatic energy complete.
The practical effects work is remarkable for 1922. Stop-motion demons crawl across ceilings. Witches appear to genuinely fly. A sorceress's workshop is rendered with the kind of detail that implies serious research into period material. None of it looks cheap. The film cost roughly 2 million Swedish kronor, which made it one of the most expensive Scandinavian productions to that point. You can see every öre of it on screen.
Compare this to Nosferatu (1922), made the same year in Germany. Murnau's film achieves its horror through shadow and implication. Häxan achieves it through spectacle and directness. Both are indispensable. They represent two different theories of what silent horror could do, and both theories turn out to be correct.
The documentary frame and what it does
Christensen returns to the lecture format periodically throughout the film. An actor playing a medieval scholar gestures at illustrations. Christensen inserts intertitles that explain what we're about to see in clinical terms, then shows us something that no clinical term can contain. The gap between the explanatory voice and the imagery it introduces is where the film does its real work.
The final section drops the medieval setting entirely. Christensen argues that the women burned as witches were suffering from conditions recognisable to early twentieth-century medicine: hysteria, somnambulism, what we'd now call psychosis. He films women in a modern hospital as direct counterparts to the women in the dramatisations. It's an argument about institutional cruelty, about how societies construct explanations for behaviour they can't tolerate, and about how the explanation matters less than the punishment. For a film made in 1922, that's a striking position to hold.
This diagnostic conclusion is both the film's most radical gesture and its most dated one. The category of "hysteria" that Christensen deploys as a corrective to demonic possession is itself a medical framework with its own history of being used to pathologise and control women. Christensen doesn't see that irony. His sympathy is genuine but bounded by his moment. The film is better for containing this flaw, because it shows you exactly how progressive thought in 1922 moved: in the right direction, but not far enough.
Christensen as filmmaker
Benjamin Christensen directed the film as a Swedish-Danish co-production under Svensk Filmindustri. He had made one previous feature, the acclaimed thriller The Mysterious X (1914), and would go on to work in Hollywood through the late silent era and early sound period. Häxan stands apart from everything else he made. It's the project where he had enough budget, enough freedom, and enough obsession to produce something genuinely sui generis.
The film's visual language draws on German Expressionism without being reducible to it. The painted backdrops and distorted architecture resemble the world The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) built two years earlier, but Häxan adds a documentary insistence that Caligari never had. Christensen wants you to believe, at some level, that what you're seeing is real evidence of something. The sets feel like archaeological reconstructions, not theatrical backdrops.
Why it still works
A century is a long time. Most films from 1922 feel like documents from another civilisation, interesting but inert. Häxan doesn't feel inert. It feels volatile. The sabbath sequences have a physical energy that contemporary horror films, built on CGI and jump cuts, rarely match. The performance of Maria Wilhelmina Svensson as the old woman Karna, accused and broken under interrogation, is devastating in a way that needs no translation across a century.
The film also has a sense of humour. Christensen's Satan grins. Demons steal butter. An inquisitor is outwitted by a woman who has understood exactly what kind of confession he wants to hear and gives it to him with perfect calm. These lighter moments don't undercut the horror. They make it worse, because they make the world feel real.
Häxan (1922) isn't a film you enjoy in any comfortable sense. It's a film you reckon with. Christensen built something that sits between history and nightmare, and one hundred years on it hasn't moved from that position. It stays exactly where he left it: burning.