In the small Copenhagen suburb of Hellerup, wild rumors circulated among the townspeople. Demonic visitors had arrived and wicked deeds ensued. Ghouls fraternized with terrifying inquisitors of centuries past. Young women drifted about possessed and frantic. And a coterie of windswept witches frolicked on brooms while a strange man bellowed commands from behind a megaphone—at times he looked human, but at other times he appeared as the devil himself. All these events occurred at night, under a shroud of secrecy. Hellerup was used to a great number of odd visitors from the city, a result of housing the Astra Film studios. However, never before and never since had anything quite like Häxan come to town.
According to a Häxan intertitle, “The devil is everywhere and takes on all shapes … he reveals himself as a nightmare, a raging demon, a seducer, a lover, and a knight …” and, as seen in the film, as its director himself. In the canon of director cameos, Benjamin Christensen’s is one of the most brazen and conspicuous—it’s also one of the most macabre and amusing. Christensen, a persistent iconoclast and rigorous self-promoter, portrays the devil in his 1922 opus, which he called a “cultural history lecture” on witchcraft through the ages. Horned and hoofed, scaly and with a reptilian tongue, the actor turned director seems to delight in his Mephistophelian role, designing his look after the delirious hellscapes of Hieronymus Bosch. As writer and director, Christensen bestows on Häxan its singularity, its unique and ambiguous blend of genres and styles, marking the Danish-
born filmmaker as a proto-auteur.
Christensen came to moving pictures first as an actor, having abandoned the study of medicine, opera singing, and his place in a theater troupe after a nervous condition wreaked havoc on his vocal cords. He appeared in a dozen notable Danish productions (none extant) before taking his directorial turn inspired by Albert Capellani’s visionary adaptation of Les Misérables in 1912. Christensen struck gold with his behind-the-camera debut, The Mysterious X (1914)—a spy melodrama in which he also starred. While a routine story, it demonstrated the immense skill of its director. Stylish and brisk, it was an international hit with critics and audiences alike. As was Christensen’s sophomore effort, Blind Justice, two years later. These two early successes raised the profile of the Danish film industry around the world but failed to recoup their costs. Yet, despite Christensen’s reputation for extravagance, the leading Swedish film studio, Svensk Filmindustri, funded the director’s third film and his dream project, Häxan (“The Witch”), offering him total creative freedom. It was a decision that the studio came to regret, but one that produced—eventually—one of the silent era’s most acclaimed and notorious cult works.
Before building a single set, Christensen obsessively pored over the 15th century’s Malleus Maleficarum, a graphically detailed Catholic treatise designed for inquisitors to identify, interrogate, and convict witches—a near physiological study of a witch’s body and spirit and how to break her. For Christensen, the purpose of Häxan was not merely to entertain (or terrify) or to show off his advanced technical skill, it was to propose a thesis: that witch trials throughout history were instances of mass hysteria. Häxan is the rare horror-infused narrative with an empathetic intent.
The pages of the Maleficarum had provided artists, poets, and playwrights a compendium from which they could flesh out their depictions of witches—from the poetry and watercolors of William Blake and Shakespeare’s Macbeth to the fantastical paintings of Francisco Goya and John William Waterhouse as well as the late 15th-
century engravings of Albrecht Dürer, whose Four Witches particularly inspired Christensen. Beyond studying Maleficarum’s rigorous text, Christensen mimicked its narrative, guiding viewers through an illustrated, sermon-like structure. Like the German clergyman Heinrich Kramer who drafted the guide, Christensen is Häxan’s expert, the director as investigator whose erudition will save humanity. Whereas Kramer sought to punish and destroy witches (principally women), Christensen wants to dispel superstition in order to prevent hysteria. He combines fact with fantasy, mystical imagery with science, continually breaking the fourth wall to remind viewers of his didactic intent. There’s even humor mixed in all of this. It is a formative work of surrealist horror.
To make such an elaborate film took time and money. While made in Christensen’s native Denmark with a Danish crew, it was Swedish krona that footed the bill, a total of three to four times the average budget of a Danish feature. Few, if any films, had taken four years to produce, but none had matched the sophistication of Christensen’s special effects. For the sequence when witches take flight, Christensen and cameraman Johan Ankerstjerne photographed seventy-five individual witches while airplane engines blew about their clothes to mimic movement. These shots were then optically printed with the photography of 250 miniature buildings filmed on a massive rotating carousel for an unforgettable flying effect. No sequence proves Christensen’s mastery over film technique more than this one. Unfortunately, it was not enough to overcome the bafflement of audiences and critics once released.
Premiering simultaneously in Stockholm, Helsingborg, Malmö, and Gothenburg in September 1922, Häxan was advertised as a major event in motion pictures. But critics were confounded by Christensen’s combination of history lesson, morality play, and artistically made spectacle. Not even the bibliography of the director’s research sources, which was handed out to moviegoers, helped. Häxan’s genre-bending format meant audiences had nothing to compare it to, little criteria to form a response. What Christensen had created was a kind of personal essay film—anticipating the works of Chris Marker and the French New Wave to come. While ecclesiastical and educational illustrated lectures had existed for decades, nothing on this scale had been attempted. When it finally opened in Copenhagen that November, the fifty-piece orchestra accompanying the film could not appease angry critics. Häxan’s fate was sealed. Writing in Denmark’s national newspaper Berlingske Tidende, one critic took great offense. “It is not this nudity which is most offensive about the picture,” the reviewer claimed. “It is the satanic, perverted cruelty that blazes out of it, the cruelty we all know has stalked the ages like an evil shaggy beast, the chimera of mankind.” Christensen had portrayed the devil in his film and now he was being compared to the devil.
Its disastrous returns put Svensk Filmindustri in financial crisis and destroyed Christensen’s reputation. Upon its American release in 1923, Variety celebrated the film’s unique vision and noted the Scandinavian penchant for “morbid realism.” Yet, while the reviewer seemed to have enjoyed many of the film’s horrors, he concluded that “it is absolutely unfit for public exhibition.” Simply put, audiences were not ready—even when the film was censored and cut, as it was in North America. Christensen’s planned follow-ups to the film—The Saints and The Spirits—were nixed. A few short years later, he sought work in Hollywood as his colleagues Sjöström and Stiller had done. Christensen helmed his first picture for MGM in 1926—the Norma Shearer-starring The Devil’s Circus, a very on-brand sounding film. After two productions with MGM, he moved to First National making similar gothic fare. The director lamented his own typecasting years later: “I never managed to escape the stamp that Häxan put on me.” He returned to Denmark at the start of World War II, and after making several sound films settled into life as a cinema manager. But Häxan survived the initial revulsion it provoked to become his trademark work, proving that some of Christensen’s black magic paid off, it just took some time.
Presented at SFSFF 2024 with live musical accompaniment by the Matti Bye Ensemble