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.

The Anatomy of Superstition: A Critical Analysis of Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan (1922)

Introduction: The Cinematic Essay as Gothic Nightmare

In the landscape of silent cinema, the year 1922 was defined by landmark achievements in visual storytelling, notably F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu and Robert J. Flaherty’s Nanook of the North. Yet, standing entirely apart from the traditional narrative films and straightforward documentaries of its era was Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan (Witchcraft Through the Ages).

Financed by the Swedish production company Svensk Filmindustri as the most expensive Swedish silent film ever made, Häxan is a brilliant, unclassifiable hybrid. It functions simultaneously as a historical slide-lecture, a dramatic reconstruction of medieval inquisitorial horror, and a progressive psychological treatise.

By utilizing the camera as an instrument of both scientific inquiry and visceral expressionism, Christensen created the world’s first true “film essay,” mapping the dark territory where religious hysteria, medieval misogyny, and modern psychological illness converge.

The Director’s Vision: Christensen’s Syncretic Style and Optical Witchcraft

Danish director Benjamin Christensen approached Häxan with an intellectual ambition that was decades ahead of its time. Rejecting the standard linear narrative, Christensen structured the film into seven distinct chapters.

The first chapter operates as an academic lecture, utilizing woodcuts, medieval diagrams, and three-dimensional models of the cosmos to establish the intellectual limitations of the medieval mind.

However, once the film transitions into its dramatic reconstructions, Christensen abandons academic distance in favor of a sensory, shadow-drenched gothic aesthetic.

Collaborating with cinematographer Johan Ankerstjerne, Christensen pioneered sophisticated low-key lighting techniques and innovative special effects. Using reverse-motion photography, double exposures, and elaborate miniature sets, Ankerstjerne brought the impossible dreamscapes of the medieval imagination to life: witches flying over moonlit rooftops, demons emerging from fireplace chimneys, and the chaotic, carnivalesque frenzy of the Witches’ Sabbath.

Christensen’s sets are characterized by a heavy, tactile realism. The wood, stone, and dirt of the medieval villages feel tangibly authentic, providing a stark, grounded canvas that makes the surreal, supernatural horrors of the persecutions feel terrifyingly immediate.

The Cast and the Physiology of Persecution

The performances in Häxan are characterized by a striking, naturalistic intensity that departs from the stylized, theatrical melodrama of the early twenties. Christensen cast a mixture of professional stage actors and non-professionals, selecting faces that projected a raw, historical authenticity:

• Maren Pedersen as Maria the Weaver (The Accused Witch): Pedersen, a non-professional whom Christensen discovered selling flowers on the streets of Copenhagen, delivers one of the most haunting performances of the silent era. With her deeply lined, weather-beaten face, hollow eyes, and toothless mouth, Pedersen embodies the tragic vulnerability of the elderly and marginalized women who were systematically targeted by the Inquisition.Her performance captures a heartbreaking trajectory: from initial, bewildered innocence to a state of broken, hallucinatory exhaustion where she eventually confesses to impossible crimes simply to halt the agony of torture.
• Benjamin Christensen as the Devil: In a brilliant, self-reflexive piece of casting, the director himself portrays the Devil. Christensen’s performance is a tour de force of animalistic physicality and pantomimic malice. Smothered in heavy, expressive makeup, he wags his tongue, snarls, and beckons to the camera, embodying the primitive, repressed sexual desires and forbidden temptations that the medieval church projected onto the figure of Satan.
• Clara Pontoppidan as Sister Cecilia: Pontoppidan plays the young, repressed nun whose sudden, hysterical fit of demonic possession triggers a wave of self-flagellation and spiritual panic within her convent. Her performance beautifully illustrates the psychological toll of enforced asceticism, showing how repressed human instincts can manifest as physical, violent convulsions.
• Tora Teje as the Hysteric: Teje appears in the film’s controversial final segment, playing a modern, bourgeois woman suffering from severe clinical hysteria. Her performance bridges the gap between the medieval past and the twentieth century, demonstrating how the same psychological symptoms once punished at the stake are now treated in modern clinics.

Historical Importance: The Secularization of the Supernatural and Censorship

Häxan occupies a monumental and highly controversial position in film history, celebrated for its structural innovations, its progressive psychological thesis, and its battles with institutional censorship:

1. The Evolution of the Film Essay:
   Historically, Häxan is recognized as a foundational text in the development of the non-fiction film. By blending historical analysis with dramatic reenactments, Christensen prefigured the docudrama and the modern essay film.The film demonstrated that cinema could be used not merely to tell a story or document a physical reality, but to construct a complex, dialectical argument, using the juxtaposition of images to explore abstract historical and psychological concepts.
2. The Psychological Transposition:
   The intellectual core of Christensen’s film is its radical, secularizing thesis. Drawing heavily on the late nineteenth-century psychiatric research of Jean-Martin Charcot and Sigmund Freud, Häxan systematically de-mystifies the supernatural.Christensen argues that the “witches” of the Middle Ages were not agents of the devil, but vulnerable, suffering individuals afflicted with psychological conditions—specifically hysteria, sleepwalking, epilepsy, and clinical depression.By comparing the symptoms of the medieval accused with those of modern psychiatric patients, the film delivers a devastating critique of religious dogma, showing how a lack of scientific understanding transformed human suffering into a theological crime.
3. Censorship and the Clash with Authority:
   Due to its graphic depictions of torture, nudity, sexual deviance, and its highly critical portrayal of the Catholic Church’s hypocrisy, Häxan was met with immediate, widespread outrage. It was banned in the United States, heavily censored or prohibited in several European countries, and condemned by religious groups.This censorship battle highlighted the immense, threatening power of the cinematic medium to challenge established historical and religious narratives, cementing the film’s reputation as a dangerous, highly subversive work of art.

Conclusion: The Unbroken Thread of Hysteria

Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan remains an enduring, visually stunning monument of early world cinema. By marrying the dark, expressive beauty of gothic horror with a rigorous, humanist skepticism and a revolutionary formal structure, the filmmakers created a work of profound cultural resonance.

It stands as a timeless, deeply disturbing exploration of the ease with which society weaponizes fear and superstition to persecute the vulnerable and the misunderstood.

More than a century after its premiere, the film’s final warning remains uncomfortably vital, reminding the viewer that while the wooden stakes and torture chambers of the Inquisition have long turned to dust, the human capacity for irrational panic, collective hysteria, and institutional cruelty remains a permanent shadow over the civilized world.