Häxan (1922) and Exploitation Movies

aka Witchcraft Through the Ages

For its large middle part, Benjamin Christensen’s intensely strange peculiar silent documentary about witchcraft (through the ages, obviously) is very much the mother (or one of the mothers, if one is in a picky mood, or really into Dario Argento) of what would follow in the realm of exploitation films as well as in the sensationalist documentary with dramatic re-enactments. Talk about being a pioneering work. All irony aside, what takes Christensen so close to the idiom we know and love is really how dubious the film’s tone is at times. Sure, the film’s last chapter certainly convinces me that the director is a compassionate man who doesn’t want to see the poor, the destitute, the old and the mentally ill either in the thralls of the inquisition nor in a 1920s style asylum, but before that, he falls into the classic ambiguity of all exploitation cinema that shows horrible stuff in great detail and with great enthusiasm while loudly condemning it. That enthusiastic approach to depravity is generally what makes a viewer doubt the truthfulness of exploitation filmmakers; if you ask me, it’s also what makes (or can make, there’s always stuff made by arseholes for arseholes) exploitation films honest and fascinating, and nearly always adds to their entertainment value.

For, if we’re being honest to ourselves, we might as well admit it: most of us – me certainly included – really enjoy watching a bit of staged depravity, some simulation of good old-fashioned human cruelty, and a bit of fake torture too. But, like the movies in which we see that sort of stuff mostly do, we would not – at least I wouldn’t – participate in the charming activities of witch hunters or baby-eating witches, nor would we (at least those among us who aren’t arseholes) be sad about a world in which witch hunts and all kinds of atrocities don’t exist. When watching an exploitation film – and Häxan absolutely is one in this sense – we are actually confronted with these very different impulses much more so than in a worthy Spielberg movie about some historical stuff we are exclusively meant to be moved by and feel good about our own enlightenment. Exploitation movies don’t give us an easy out because they only ever very mildly pretend we don’t to a degree enjoy watching the ugly stuff; turns out they are a mirror.


But back to Christensen’s film for a couple of sentences or so, before I wrap this rambling piece up. And back to joyful depravity, for particularly for the friend of the macabre, there’s some great stuff to look at and let sink into one’s dreams. The witch’s Sabbath sequence is rightly famous, seeing as it is a fever dream of sexual imagery, the director himself as a tongue-waggling devil (in a costume so great, various modern films could learn from it), a thing with a skeletal horse head, baby murder, and all the joys medieval imagination brought us. But there’s also a short visit to a nunnery that should make Ken Russell’s The Devils obsolete (don’t ask me about Ken Russell), a couple of lurid sequences set in a witch coven’s lair, and some choice demonstrations of torture devices and psychological cruelty by the inquisition. Also there and accounted for are humanoid walking pigs that would have given William Hope Hodgson nightmares while also looking patently absurd, and bizarre cat costumes. Among the wonderful weirdness on display, there are also moments of the sort of great, dream-like poetry you only get from silent cinema. In Häxan’s case, much of it can be found in the least fantastic pieces of it, in the close-ups of women’s faces: the old victim of the inquisition and the young and beautiful one both suggest a hidden depth of suffering of women at the hands of men words – and certainly not words written in 1922 – can’t or won’t express. Which of course either turns Häxan into less of an exploitation film at all, or a particularly good one.