Häxan: The Film That Made the Devil Real
In 1922, a Swedish-Danish director named Benjamin Christensen decided to make a documentary about witchcraft.
Then he decided to play the Devil himself.
What he produced was Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages — a film so strange, so beautiful, and so deeply uncomfortable that it was immediately banned in the United States, severely cut in Britain, and didn't find its proper audience until the 1960s, when it was re-released with a jazz score and narration by William S. Burroughs. By which point, it had already influenced sixty years of cinema that its makers would never know about.
I have screened Häxan more times than I can count. It never becomes ordinary.
The Film No One Can Categorise
Häxan defies taxonomy. It opens as a lecture — Christensen himself, pointing at medieval woodcuts and illuminated manuscripts, explaining the historical development of belief in witchcraft. He is calm, scholarly, methodical. You think you are watching an educational film.
Then the dramatisations begin.
What follows is a series of enacted scenes from medieval and early modern history: a witch's kitchen, a Sabbath presided over by a horned and cloven-footed Satan, the torture of an accused woman, a convent full of nuns apparently possessed by demonic forces. These scenes are technically extraordinary — the creature designs, the special effects, the makeup applied to Christensen himself in the role of Mephisto — and they are genuinely disturbing in ways that modern horror, with all its resources, rarely manages.
The film then shifts again into early proto-social commentary: Christensen argues that the women burned as witches in earlier centuries were, by the standards of 1922, likely suffering from what we would now recognise as anxiety, depression, dissociative disorders, psychosis. The diagnosis is inevitably of its time. But the moral instinct is correct. These were not witches. They were unwell women in a world that had no category for female suffering except sin.
Why It Was Dangerous
The bans were not purely about the supernatural content. Häxan showed things that silent cinema was not supposed to show: naked figures in the Sabbath scenes, the physical reality of torture, a Church implicated in cruelty rather than protected from it.
More fundamentally, it refused to be safe. It kept moving between registers — documentary and drama, horror and lecture, past and present — in a way that left audiences uncertain of where they stood. Was this art or exploitation? Education or sensation? Condemnation of the darkness it depicted, or something stranger?
The answer is that it was all of these things simultaneously. That is what makes it a genuine film rather than a product.
The Devil's Footprint
*Häxan*'s visual language runs through the horror that followed it in ways that are rarely credited.
The Sabbath imagery — the horned figure at the centre, the circle of worshippers, the ritual that inverts church ceremony — became a template that resurfaced decade after decade. Rosemary's Baby, The Wicker Man, Midsommar: the geometry of the Sabbath is still Christensen's geometry.
The idea of demonic possession as bodily rebellion — women contorting, defying the physical constraints of their bodies — reappears in The Exorcist, in Hereditary, in almost every possession film since. Before Christensen dramatised it in 1922, there was no visual vocabulary for this. After him, every director who wanted to show possession knew what it looked like.
And the moral argument — that what one age calls supernatural the next age calls medical; that the boundary between the sacred and the pathological shifts across time — has never been more necessary or more uncomfortable.
The Sound of the Sabbath
Häxan Night on Silver Screen Ghosts carries the Witch House genre — dark synth, pitched vocals, ritual percussion — as the natural descendant of what Christensen was building visually a century ago.
Witch House as a genre is named for this specific territory: the overlap of folk horror, ritual, and electronic music. It is the sound of the Sabbath translated into bass frequencies and processed voices. Christensen would have recognised the impulse, I think. He understood that some things are better felt in the body than explained to the mind.
There is a lineage in music that runs parallel to the one in cinema — the same impulse to use rhythm and repetition to access something that language won't reach. The women accused of witchcraft understood this. So did the men who condemned them.
The Projectionist's Note
I sometimes wonder what Christensen made of his film's afterlife. He went on to make comedies. He spent years in Hollywood, directing respectable pictures. He died in 1959, having watched his scandalous 1922 experiment become a cult artefact and a touchstone for every filmmaker who wanted to go somewhere the mainstream couldn't follow.
He dressed as the Devil and got away with it. He made the camera a confessional booth and called it a documentary.
The shadows of German Expressionism and the darkness of Häxan were made at almost the same moment, by artists responding to the same fractured world after the same war. One movement named itself. The other resisted classification entirely.
The booth is darker when Häxan runs. I have learned not to work late on those nights.
— The Projectionist