Wonderful getting to watch Haxan on the big screen with a specially created score.
The classic 1920s silent film examines the witch myth, the mass hysteria of the witch hunt, and its modern explanations of neuroses. In doing so, it births just about every trope of the horror genre to follow.
Surprisingly easy watch, given its age and how foreign that style of silent film is to us now, like reading Shakespeare in school. But Haxan is actually still very entertaining, and funny. And sexy. Like, really really filthy for its time. While tastefully keeping key areas out of view, there is no end of folk being stripped, whether to go out carousing with the devil, or to be poked and prodded by inquisitors. And the devil is overtly sexual, wiggling his tongue suggestively, or presenting his arse to be kissed by a line of witches.
(Side note: I’ve read witchcraft history some, and you’d be surprised how often arse-kissing comes up again and again. They were obsessed with it. Which given that the accounts are pure nonsense, the articulation of collective nightmares, makes you wonder if that wasn’t the medieval equivalent of the ultimate taboo sex act. The lack of adequate sanitary conditions probably made rimming a do-or-die sport so it would have been something you daren’t ask for, and thus its unattainability making it the object of obsession. Pet theory, nothing to do with the film.)
The filmmaker presents Haxan as a lecture in the history of the witch and the witch hunt. It explains the medieval worldview, and what the witch represented in that time. He even uses a pointer to gesture to interesting features in paintings and artwork from the time. The stern seriousness of these moments are used as permission to go into dramatisations of witch tales, complete with scantily clad women dancing to the devil’s piping, or nuns breaking into hysterical mass possession and casting aside propriety, or a pious man of the cloth begging to be flogged for his sinful thoughts. It’s actually very funny, leaning into the ridiculous, by showing women dressed as cats sneak into a church, supposedly as the story goes, to defecate on the holy altar.
Which, again, gotta say, the costuming is amazing. 1922 this film was made, and it actually still looks really good. The devil’s imps that accompany him on fife and drum remind me of nothing so much as the Fireys from Labyrinth, a movie made more than 60 years later. From the skeleton horse to the demonic pig, the costume design is just excellent.
The film concludes by rejoicing that we live in more enlightened times, where women are not decried as witches, but instead diagnosed as hysterics. Don’t know how to break it to the director but electroshock treatment and lobotomies were not the huge step forward he thought they were. And in making the connection, articulates so precisely who came to regulate and oppress women in the modern era.
Possibly the best part of Haxan is, after all the women in the nip being caressed by demons, after the men being driven wild with lust due to spells, after the demonstration of the modes of restraint and torture for scientific and totally not titillating reasons, the word for The End comes up on the screen in Swedish: SLUT.