Häxan: Witchcraft through the Ages

Director: Benjamin Christensen

1922 / 78min / 35mm

Mad Dane Christensen, who appears in his film as both a physician and the Prince of Darkness himself, stirred up this heady brew of an “expose” on the hidden history of the occult from medieval to early modern times, told via a series of vignettes which employ re-enactments, animations, and ingenious early special effects to produce a bevy of Boschian imagery of grave-robbings, rabid nuns, and Satan-worshipping Sabbaths, combining to make a work that’s part mock-documentary, part proto-psychedelia circa 1922. Re-emerged as a late-‘60s campus counterculture classic with a William S. Burroughs narrative, the film screens here in its untampered and no-less-unhinged original silent version.