Häxan is such a silent movie, adventurous, daring, trying new things, but it is also one of the only films that defies any convention, any labeling. It is part documentary, part drama, part comedy, and part horror. Yet this movie comes from a Danish director, not a German one, and exemplifies the limitless boundaries of the imagination from that time.
The movie is told in seven parts, though most of them really don't mark the ending of one story. Chapter One is basically a slideshow, as director Benjamin Christensen shows us a lot of researched history on the paranoia of people from the Middle Ages that led to their belief in Witches (Häxan translates, more or less, to The Witches). We get drawings that illustrate hell, where demons put the damned into cauldrons (I couldn't help but notice one of the cauldrons was marked "Judei"), and hot metal liquid is poured down the damned's throat.
Part Two on is mainly recreated scenarios involving witches actually existing. We see the horrible hags in their coven, plundering dead thieves' bodies from the gallows and using their remains in potions. One witch requests a love potion and we get two imagined scenes in which a portly brother of the church chases the witch, madly in love with her.
The film also highlights how witches were ousted: being thrown, naked, into a pond to determine their witchhood. If they floated, they were recovered from the pond and burned; if they sank, the fathers would thank God for sparing this girl's soul (though no remark is made as to whether this woman is rescued).
The only part of the movie I would call a running story, or thread, comes when a man falls ill and his wife blames witchcraft. An old woman stops by for food, and the wife immediately has her arrested by the church, who proceed to torture a confession out of her. And she describes the Witches' mass.
The Witches' mass is introduced to us in the film's first chapter, and it is mainly something you kind of have to see to really grasp how paranoid everyone was back then. To partake, the women fly high up into the sky to some castle and garden, and proceed to frolic with the devil and his minions. Probably the most significant moment of this movie involves the witches proceeding one by one to the devil and placing a kiss on his derrière. This marks them as witches, and allows them to continue on their evil wicked ways.
What message this movie is trying to put out, what lesson it is trying to teach is unclear to me. I was never certain if the director believed all the findings he researched, or he was merely laughing at how paranoid everyone was back then, and how that paranoia made everything a reality. Really, he seems to be presenting the second part as his main point, but he also has conviction in the scenes involving the witches.
The movie breaks the fourth wall a lot, and in Chapter 6 or 7, the director mentions that the actress who played Maria the Weaver (Maren Pedersen, another witch) turned to the director during shooting and said, "The Devil is real. I have seen him sitting at my bedside." Her conviction in this story is resolute, which is why Mrs. Pedersen probably partook of this film.
This film was made before there were conventions and clichés in film. There were no definite rules of story that we learn today in our classes, and Häxan is a movie breathing with life and invention from its director's limitless research on the subject of Witchcraft in the Middle Ages. Even by today's standards I would say this film is very daring and I have really never seen anything like it in all the other movies I have ever seen.
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