Benjamin Christensen’s 1922 silent horror film Häxan offers an edgy take on witchcraft
The Cinematheque curator Sonja Baksa delivers a week of programming centred on celluloid witches, just in time for Halloween
Häxan.
The Cinematheque presents Häxan on October 24 at 8 pm, and Häxan with “Witch’s Cradle” on October 31 at 6:30 pm, as part of the series Watch Out, That Woman Has Evil Eyes: Celluloid Witches
WE FIND OURSELVES, once again, in the midst of an occult revival.
After the 2016 U.S. election, magical practitioners across the States, but especially young women in Brooklyn, notoriously collaborated on a spell to “bind” Trump. In academia, researchers like Rice University’s Jeffrey Kripal pursue the spooky outer reaches of consciousness joined by authors like Mitch Horowitz (Occult America) or podcasters like Rune Soup’s Gordon White in a serious investigation of esoteric spiritual practices.
In popular culture, as film curator Sonja Baksa notes during a call to Stir, “You’ll see lots of talk these days about ‘manifesting’. Tarot and horoscopes are back in the conversation a lot more.”
Common to any period of such activity is the figure of the witch, whose representation in the magic shadowbox of cinema gets a welcome overview, courtesy of Baksa, just in time for Halloween at The Cinematheque. And opening this particular season of the celluloid witch on October 24 is—what else?—the primary text on the subject, Benjamin Christensen’s 1922 orgiastic curio Häxan, a Danish shocker recently discussed on Reddit as “the edgiest silent film ever made”. Christensen’s goal was to demystify the supernatural, but things didn’t work out that way, as if something imperceptible commandeered and subverted the film’s mission.
“It’s kind of ironic, what it accomplished,” remarks Baksa on the film’s elaborately staged rituals and menagerie of demons and crones. “That imagery has morphed over the years, but those were some of the first associations that were sealed in the collective imagination. Because film is powerful in that way. What you see onscreen stays with you; those images imprint themselves in a way on the audience.”
Ultimately, the spell cast by Häxan is lasting. Paired with the Danish film on Halloween night is the 1943 short “Witch’s Cradle”, a collaboration between Marcel Duchamp and legendary avant-garde American filmmaker Maya Deren—a devoted occultist who would reject Christensen’s rationalism. Here the spell is intentional, and derives from a sincere belief in magic.
“Häxan has this weird alchemy based on where it starts and where it ends up as a piece of art,” says Baksa, “but I think that’s how it ties to Maya Deren’s work. I think just in general, in the practice of witchcraft, there’s a correlation to creativity and the making of art. With ‘Witch’s Cradle’, you’re seeing something, you’re not sure what, but you can feel this infusion of magic in this film, in something you’re seeing before your eyes, which I think is very powerful.
“This subject has been inspiring filmmakers since the dawn of film,” continues Baksa, who explored occult themes in film in her final thesis at the University of Edinburgh. “This involved researching the history of witches in cinema and how the subject was interpreted based on the cultural moment. I found it fascinating how witches were part of every culture in the world, in some way. The myth is universal. That was the starting point for me.”
Stretching from the 15th to 17th centuries, the witch craze still exerts a persistent weight on modern culture, either as the chief example of religious moral panic or for its genocidal expression of misogyny. In turn, The Cinematheque’s program reflects the evolution of the witch into an all-purpose cultural signifier which usually draws, for good or bad, on the mystery of the feminine.
René Clair’s I Married a Witch and George Miller’s The Witches of Eastwick are both delightful but nonetheless emanate from an ancient phobia around “the power of beauty and charisma,” as Baksa puts it, “which society doesn’t know what to do with sometimes, and that tends to scare a traditional patriarchal society. There’s a certain power to women’s bodies, what they do in giving birth. It’s a mysterious phenomenon, and all these things are related in terms of the power that is assigned to a woman.”
As for pure genre, The Cinematheque’s program also offers Dario Argento’s 1980 rococo masterpiece Inferno, his undervalued sequel to Suspiria—both of which could arguably be called “women’s films”—and a 25th-anniversary screening of The Blair Witch Project. An enormous box office hit in 1999, Blair Witch presaged a folk-horror revival now in full swing a quarter-century later. Baksa is circumspect, but the symmetry with other, current cultural phenomena hardly needs spelling out.
“I think usually what happens is we can look back and maybe detect some patterns,” she offers. “I think right now it’s difficult to say anything with certainty because we’re living in it, but there’s this massive collective energy that we’re all feeling that something’s off. Folklore is always related to certain cultural and spiritual roots, and I think there’s a collective feeling of disconnect and so maybe we’re trying to find our own rooting. We can find that in folklore, in oral traditions, or legends, or anything that brings us back to our origins.” We can also find it at the movies. 
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