Haxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages

Please join us on Sunday, March 20th for the next installment of our Silents, Please! Series - Haxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages, with live musical accompaniment by Richard Nicol of Pittsburgh Modular Synthesizers.  

The film is the 1922 Swedish-Danish silent film written and directed by Benjamin Christensen. Based partly on Christensen's study of theMalleus Maleficarum, a 15th-century German guide for inquisitors, Häxan is a study of how superstition and the misunderstanding of diseases and mental illness could lead to the hysteria of the witch-hunts. The film was made as a documentary but contains dramatised sequences that are comparable to horror films.

With Christensen's meticulous recreation of medieval scenes and the lengthy production period, the film was the most expensive Scandinavian silent film ever made, costing nearly two million Swedish kronor. Although it won acclaim in Denmark and Sweden, the film was banned in the United States and heavily censored in other countries for what were considered at that time graphic depictions of torture, nudity, and sexual perversion.