Häxan 1922

This movie was really unusual in form, and totally bonkers in terms of its content. I’d characterize it as a kind of proto-documentary, ostensibly using a 15th century text to explore the nature of witchcraft across time. The movie begins with a more serious exploration of artistic representations of witchcraft (which was quite boring–Ken Burns wasn’t around to direct this part), before turning to dramatized depictions of what witches do. But it becomes more interesting as the movie goes on because it’s clear that the movie has a point of view: it’s forcing us to look at what witchcraft would mean if we took these claims seriously. Which means we got lots of insane depictions of women literally birthing demons, of women digging up corpses, of women being seduced by Satan (a Satan with a truly disturbing serpent tongue flapping about.) My wife saw some of these parts on in the background and said “this is the stuff nightmares are made of”–it’s pretty effective as straight horror.

But what’s MOST interesting about this movie was how the tone of the overall picture begins to develop and cohere into a political point of view. Near the end of the film it transitions to the question of what “witchcraft” as concept has meant for women (always women), and makes the point that witchcraft hasn’t gone away: we just call it something else. For even now, we marginalize and subjugate women in ways that aren’t all that different from the 15th century, but we dress it up and call it something different. In 1920s Denmark, that meant using mental health to “other” women, and the movie makes some convincing, modern, progressive arguments that what is past is prologue. This movie took me by surprise and I really loved it.