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Häxan main poster

7.6/10 • 399

1922-09-181h 45m

DocumentaryHorrorHistory

Grave robbing, torture, possessed nuns, and a satanic Sabbath: Benjamin Christensen's legendary film uses a series of dramatic vignettes to explore the scientific hypothesis that the witches of the Middle Ages suffered the same hysteria as turn-of-the-century psychiatric patients. But the film itself is far from serious-- instead it's a witches' brew of the scary, gross, and darkly humorous.

Directors
Benjamin Christensen
Writters
Benjamin Christensen
Editors
Benjamin Christensen, Edla Hansen

Top Billed Cast

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  1. Benjamin Christensen

    Benjamin Christensen

    Devil

  2. Ella La Cour

    Ella La Cour

    Karna, Sorceress

  3. Emmy Schønfeld

    Emmy Schønfeld

    Karna's Assistant

  4. Kate Fabian

    Kate Fabian

    Old Maid

  5. Oscar Stribolt

    Oscar Stribolt

    Fat Monk

  6. Wilhelmine Henriksen

    Wilhelmine Henriksen

    Apelone, a Poor Old Woman

  7. Elisabeth Christensen

    Elisabeth Christensen

    Anna's Mother

  8. Astrid Holm

    Astrid Holm

    Anna

  9. Karen Winther

    Karen Winther

    Anna's Sister

Reviews1

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CinemaSerf Avatar

CinemaSerf

Dec 31, 2024

7/10

Next time you look around and wonder where all the sparrows have gone, just be thankful you didn't live in a time where their bodies were pulverised to make a potion to ward off evil spirits! That's just one of the examples cited in this interestingly whacky look at all things devilish and malevolent. It's not the most rational of tours of the witching sorority, but it does by the end of the sixth chapter converge on quite a potent evaluation of the absurd, the terrifying, the superstitious and the religious and quite successfully demonstrates the plethora of overlapping philosophies, manipulative strategies and just plain scaredy-catness of mankind's behaviour when faced with things unknown and unpredictable. The rudimentary augmentation of human bodies with wings, horns, hooves - all illustrated here using quite an entertaining mixture of what looks like ancient scripture, coupled with some silent film footage and plenty of plasticine shows it wasn't just the uneducated classes who bought into all of this mysticism. It's accompanied by some quite pithy and informative, discursive even, inter-titles that try to balance between the silly and the serious and some of the characterisations are genuinely quite thought-provoking, especially as the church was often a prime mover in causing and/or dealing with the consequences of these fevered and violent old wives' tales. I can't say I could make sense of all of it, but I think that might have been auteur Benjamin Christansen's point as he opens a Pandora's Box and let's us do the heavy sifting. One man's witch is another man's nun!

Media

  • Häxan poster
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  • Häxan poster
  • Häxan poster
  • Häxan poster
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Status
Released
Original Language
Swedish
Budget
$220,000.00
Revenue
--
Keywords
witchsuperstitioninsanitymysticsorceryhysteriasatanblack and whitetorturedevildemonwitchcraftmental illnessmiddle ages (476-1453)silent filmsatanic rituallove potionspellcastingburned at the stakefolk horroraccusationnervous disorder