The imposing brick structure of the Hare and Hounds, with its gothic tower standing tall on the street corner and moody Victorian bar (complete with a burgundy pressed-tin ceiling,) seemed the perfect location to view Benjamin Christensen’s 1922 feature, ‘Häxan’, for the first time. Especially in the damp, cool air of an early October evening. The accompanying fractal, haunting live-score provided by Margate-based drone band Autohaus, and spooky themed snacks by Blow Water were the cherries atop the evening. It must be said that Screen B14, Kings Heath’s very own community cinema collective, planned this event exceptionally well.  

It’s a wonder I hadn’t yet seen ‘Häxan’ really – a black and white, silent, Swedish horror documentary (maybe mockumentary? It’s a hard film to categorise…) detailing the history of witchcraft and sorcery in Europe is like, the epitome of my type in films. Maybe it was this expectation of love that had deterred me for so long. You know when you really feel like you should watch something because you know you’ll adore it, but then you almost feel scared to watch it because what if you don’t? What then? But as soon as I saw the gorgeous poster for Screen B14’s event, designed by Birmingham artist Ashley Swift (of whom I’m quite a fan, makes some of the best posters going as far as I’m concerned) I knew it was time to dive in head-first. 

Organised into seven chapters, ‘Häxan’ becomes progressively unhinged throughout its 1 hour 44-minute runtime. Starting with a fairly straight-forward and straight-laced, academic presentation on historic perceptions of witches, demons, and the cosmos in which they were believed to exist, it almost lulls you into a false sense of security. You begin to expect a fairly dry film. Although in all fairness, calling the images flashed up on screen – filled with fire, bewitched shoes, and leering naked devils to boot – “straight-laced” is perhaps a disservice. 

The opening frames of the film show text referring to Christensen’s source list which can be found in the ‘theatre playbill’. Unfortunately, despite my searching, I have not been able to find a copy of this online. ‘Häxan’ undoubtedly draws liberally from the Malleus Maleficarum, a fifteenth-century German treatise on Witchcraft written by Heinrich Krammer which is one hell of a read and would provide ample material for several feature length films alone.1 However, according to one article I read, the original source list allegedly featured over 60 works. Christensen researched heavily for this film, taking over two years, and the first chapter makes this apparent with its wide-ranging references and deep pool of information. It’s almost like a literature review before you jump into the main meat of the essay; it tells you what people have historically believed about witches. But the following sections show you.

As soon as the dramatic enactments of chapters two through six begin, act one starts to feel like a distant memory of a simpler time – perhaps a history lecture? Particularly in the face of the heavy-handed, tongue-wagging devils furiously churning butter who we get to meet along the road. Twice. 

Chapter two, made up of a series of short vignettes, takes us to a witch’s hovel where we see thieves’ fingers being boiled for love potions, the seduction of a Friar, and finally – featuring some of the most iconic images of the film – the Witches’ Sabbath. The Sabbath scenes are truly a marvel of film making, and I can’t believe just how good they look over 100 years after they were shot. The set pieces, double exposures, reversing of the film, and practical effects serve to create a real sense of magic and honestly I found myself sitting watching it, mouth agape in wonder at how they’d pulled it off. ‘Haxan’ is still the most expensive silent Scandinavian film ever made, and you can tell just how much that financial backing allowed for the time, care, and artistry that went into the building of its world. For example, they exclusively shot at night to create the right visual tone for the work and to ensure the cast felt the ominous atmosphere Christensen believed was necessary for the film to succeed. 

It was during this middle section of ‘Häxan’ that I felt the score from Autohaus really click into place. I can often find live scores slightly difficult – the film begins to feel like a music video for the band rather than the band doing the music for the film. I think this is something to do with the musicians being there in the flesh against the unconscious, unfeeling film. It can really stress me out to feel like I’m not paying enough attention to either the band OR the film – I was worried I would be feeling this way throughout ‘Häxan’ during the opening chapter, but once we were past the historical survey and into the wild visual world at the centre of the film I could relax. The music began to pair perfectly with what I was seeing on the screen.

Chapters three, four, and five continue the trend of dramatic, acted scenes but presents a more long-form narrative arc for Maria the Weaver, an old Woman accused of witchcraft by the inquisition. Maria is eventually tortured until she, out of desperation, confesses a whole myriad of satanic actions and gives the names of other witches the Inquisition should investigate. Another favourite scene occurs in this section, when Maria describes having Satan’s children and is shown birthing these bizarre bug creatures with massive shining eyes. I say this a lot, but I truly mean it when I say I want nothing more than to make art that looks like this….
Curiously there are also more informational scenes showing how torture devices like thumb screws are used, demonstrating them on the actors when they are out of character. These contrasting ‘educational’ scenes hark back to the tone of chapter one, creating a concentrated fusion of fact and fiction, education and entertainment. This is only compounded by the final chapter which posits medieval witches as women suffering from “nervous disorders”, or equivalent to “the modern hysteric” – a theory that is now well-established and well known, but also much critiqued due to its reductive and overly-simplified positioning of Europe’s Witch hunts. In a way, Haxan kind of reminds me of films like The Princess Bride or The Grand Budapest Hotel, where the body of the film is presented as a story being read by a narrator: a fantasy framed by supposed reality, although of course, the entirety of the film is fiction.

The middle section, and main body of the film, presents scenes of witchy-behaviour and the treatment of witches, as it was understood in the Medieval period – or maybe moreso how audiences in the 1920s believed Medieval people viewed/treated witchcraft. The existence of sources such as the ‘Malleus Maleficarum’, court documents, and testimonies suggest that some medieval people did indeed understand witchcraft in these sensational and exaggerated terms.However, in current scholarship it’s now widely accepted that the hyperbolic mythology of witchcraft was much more a creation of earlier historians than a true reflection of the past. Of course, we can never truly know the past, but statistics or facts often given about witchcraft are demonstrably false. For example, it is relatively commonly stated and believed that millions of women were killed in European witch hunts across the Early Modern Period – a claim that can be traced back to eighteenth-century historian Gottfried Christian Voigt. However, his methods of getting to this figure were questionable at best. He looked at one incident of a particularly violent Witchhunt in a single German town, applied the ratio of ‘witches:wider population from that town’ to cover the entirety of Europe’s population, and then multiplied it to cover eleven centuries, leading to a wildly inflated figure. 

Lots more has been written responding to the historical idea of the European Witch hunts than I can delve into here, but it’s interesting to think about the interpretation of history in relation to‘ Häxan’, particularly considering the vast amounts of research Christensen did for the film. Returning to my earlier comparison to films framed by narrators reading a story which becomes the main body of the work, at the time ‘Häxan’ was perhaps perceived in this way – as a “true story” – but now, as the film itself becomes a historical artefact, we become one more narrator deep. The chaptered structure of ‘Häxan’ serves to make it feel like a continuous work, a historical dialogue. By watching it in 2025 you’re simply adding a seventh chapter to the narrative: ‘Häxan: The Revised Edition’ – updated to reflect current views and understandings. The image of the witch becomes a thread running between past (the Medieval period), present (meaning the point at which the film was made), and the future (or when it is watched now).

Anyway, that’s a lot of thoughts and feelings raised for a Sunday evening at the Hare and Hounds, but what a joy to be able to engage with such fantastic cinema in Kings Heath! Screen B14 are truly programming some amazing events across Birmingham, and I can’t wait to see what they do next.