Haxan (1922) One of the Single Most Important Texts for Folk Horror

Sometimes it can be hard to know where to begin with a review, especially when it’s a title like Haxan – Benjamin Christensen’s 1922 hybrid horror documentary-esque essay that, it could be argued, created this type of film. It walks a strange tightrope between over-familiarity and freshness, shock and nostalgia – mainly because it’s been circulated in many versions, had its images of devils and demons frequently reproduced, and seen its influence over decades of cinema become widespread while it remained, until fairly recently, very difficult to see in its original form.

This status is perhaps suitable for a film that plays with and recreates the imagery of past centuries that, since the Medieval era, altered generations of Western perception and understanding of the physical, metaphysical, evangelical and anti-theistic realms, becoming permanently ingrained at a level below consciousness. It could also be argued that over a century of technical and technological development prevent us from seeing Haxan as anything other than the old, almost ancient product of a half-remembered, decaying-but-eternally haunting traditional imagination – especially as Christensen presents woodcuts and illustrations in the place-setting lecture that makes up the first of the film’s seven episodes.

Either way, Haxan returns in a definitive edition from Radiance Films, collecting the most recent and complete restoration of the film (with three different soundtracks), alongside Witchcraft Through the Ages (1968) – a version edited for English-speaking audiences from the late sixties that would resurface in 2001 as part of Criterion’s “rescue mission”. The latter film cut about thirty minutes of footage in favour of the most sensationalistic material, added a jazz score and narration by William Burroughs in an attempt to re-brand it for counter-cultural audiences who, it was obviously presumed, couldn’t be expected to appreciate the original on its own terms.

This butchery subsequently warped understandings of Haxan’s intentions for a good few decades, but contemporary sentiments have progressed so the film’s documentary elements are no longer viewed as an excuse to indulge in “sadistic pornography” (as per David Kehr). Christensen’s attempts at reframing displays of “witchcraft” as psychological disruptions and abnormalities born of violent times, poverty, and the oppression of women in general, are now considered to be deeply rational, proto-feminist ideals. His concluding studies of modern “female hysteria” have become dated, but these were born from controversial Freudian interpretations and terminology. Haxan is a prescient example of the sort of things that would soon be applied, not just to historic accounts of witches and witch-hunts, but also to horror (particularly folk-horror), in general.


Attempting to find something new in Haxan might be foolhardy because it’s extremely difficult to expect constant newness and rediscovery in works that have reached three figures in age, but if there is something then it’s perhaps the working-out of a conflict within the medium. The concept of Cinema of Cruelty is attributed to influential French critic André Bazin, and although images of violence have become increasingly weightless and detached from reality over the decades (to the extent that we may even see colour-correction and upscaling attempted on images of genocide as a matter of course in the mainstream), the actual idea is rooted in objectivity, directors pushing boundaries, and audience expectations.

For Roger Ebert, movies were “like a machine that generates empathy” – which seems like a simplistic notion, and one that could be undermined by issues of complicity and the politics of representation. Radically early in the history of the medium, Christensen himself does this in a scene where he recounts that during a break in filming, an actress playing an old woman being tortured at a witch trial turned her face to him, and informed him that she had actually seen the real devil at her own bedside. Christensen chose to recreate that moment in the film, using the same pictorial framework that captured her fake confession, and implicitly casting himself in the off-screen position of the medieval inquisitor. 


The isn’t much need to doubt the sincerity of Christensen’s desire to use “modern” science and psychoanalysis to re-examine historical records and challenge conceptions of demonic and witchy influence in the course of everyday life. Likewise, there also isn’t much need to question the scenes of sacrilegious Witches Sabbaths, “possessed” nuns, or interrogations of distressed old and young women by sweaty, porcine monks and lascivious, eye-rolling witch-finders – all of whom seem to like licking their own lips. Christensen further highlights the artistic complicity of media in this continued exploitation by casting himself as the tongue-waggling, masturbatory Devil, the lavish and lurid details of these tableaus evoking a chilly sense of terror that has yet to be surpassed by any film of the same age.

The images of barbarity and the transcendence of conventional morality were, perhaps, more potently charged when the film was originally released as the Great War was still a recent memory – one that’s eventually evoked in one of the final vignettes of mental illness. It’s perhaps telling that it was only a year after the conflict ended that Christensen began to study the Malleus Maleficarum (the famous witch-finders guide), and that production began and continued during a period when the trauma of surviving soldiers and civilians was first being recorded.

It may be that you can read an exorcism into Haxan, as its recreation of cruel histories and images of suffering give way to expressions of optimism for a more humane future. The film may also tackle some of the root causes of religious hysteria and oppression that were making a return in the old horrors of Post-World War Europe and Scandinavia. It seems that while presenting the interrogation of supposed witches, Christensen began to realise that his own time and art form were uniquely placed to respond, both directly and indirectly, to that scene – even in its most obscure or “historical” form.


As a result, the images that resonate the most aren’t the ones that have become the most familiar (like Christensen’s devil), but are instead those that operate either like Méliès’ miracles, the eternal visions of suffering that have and aged yet timeless quality and suffused with time. Of the former type my personal favourite being the silhouette of an unidentified person who’s flanked at the top of a tree by an owl and a songbird, who is watching the onward rush through the night sky of superimposed witches – all of whom are exquisite in their miniature detail. Of the latter, one the immediately springs to mind is the image of the aforementioned haggard old woman who, while muttering false recriminations of her neighbours, bleeds from her scalp as the torturer turns the screws. In a sense, the old woman is the shadow and twin of Jeanne d’Arc from Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc – who herself was a victim of, and participant in, a period of spiralling violence with no end in sight, and no more places to hide.

Billy’s Archive – Haxan