Film

Häxan

Name: Häxan
Genre: Documentary, Horror, History
Released: 1922
Cast: Benjamin Christensen, Ella La Cour, Emmy Schønfeld, Kate Fabian, Oscar Stribolt

Half lecture, half fever dream, Benjamin Christensen's silent essay-film argues that medieval witch panic was really untreated hysteria — then illustrates the theory with the gleeful, gruesome pageantry it claims to be debunking. Devils grope nuns, hags kiss Satan's backside, and Christensen himself plays the Devil with unshakable relish. Part textbook, part nightmare, still stranger than most things made since.

TMDb rating

7.6

If you liked this

The Witch2016

Robert Eggers rebuilds the same Puritan dread from scratch, treating 17th-century witchcraft accusations as lived, unbearable reality rather than metaphor — the exact paranoia Häxan diagnosed as illness, here played dead straight and terrifying.

But Glacially slow with archaic dialogue; if you wanted jump scares, this isn't that movie.

The Devils1971

Ken Russell's banned-for-decades vision of possessed nuns and inquisitorial torture is the closest anyone's come to filming Häxan's hysteria-as-horror thesis in colour, and it's every bit as feverish and grotesque.

But Genuinely upsetting imagery and hard to find uncut; not something to put on casually.

Witchfinder General1968

Vincent Price plays a real-life witch-hunter as a calm, profiteering sadist, turning the same historical machinery Häxan mocked into a grim, plainly told atrocity with no supernatural excuse at all.

But Bleak and cruel with none of Häxan's dark comedy to soften it.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

The Act of Killing2012

This documentary uses dramatised reenactment to make an atrocity legible, exactly the trick Häxan pulled decades earlier — and it's just as morally vertiginous, only the horror here actually happened.

A landmark documentary that gets Indonesian death-squad leaders to restage their real killings as the movie genres they love, producing something far stranger and more damning than straight testimony ever could.

But Real, recent, unfictionalised violence with perpetrators who feel no remorse — much heavier going than anything staged for a 1922 camera.

Nosferatu1922

Made the very same year, this is the era's other great silent nightmare — proof 1922 audiences were getting some of horror's most enduring images decades before anyone thought to name the genre.

But A vampire story, not a witch one, and its scares now read as more eerie than frightening.

The Passion of Joan of Arc1928

Falconetti's face under interrogation is the silent era's other great study of a woman destroyed by religious male panic, shot with a rawness that still feels startlingly modern.

But No traditional score or horror trappings — closer to devastating drama than scare-fest.

The Wicker Man1973

Swap medieval inquisitors for a smiling pagan island and you get the idea inverted: a rational outsider undone by belief he refuses to take seriously, right up until it's far too late.

But Deliberate folk-horror pacing, and the ending's fame may have already spoiled its punch.

Suspiria1977

Argento drags the witches' coven into a garish, blood-red dance academy nightmare — all style and dread, proof the subject survives being pushed into pure operatic excess.

But Thin story and rough dubbing; it's a mood piece, not a plot-driven one.

Midsommar2019

Ari Aster's daylight cult horror shares Häxan's fascination with ritual as both community and threat, staged with the same unblinking, almost anthropological patience.

But Nearly two and a half hours of slow dread; punishing if you're not already on board.

A Field in England2013

Ben Wheatley's hallucinatory Civil War trip — alchemists, mushrooms, men losing their minds in a field — carries the same woozy, black-and-white folk-nightmare energy as Häxan's own delirium.

But Deliberately disorienting and plotless by design; frustrating if you want a clear story.

Day of Wrath1943

Same historical premise, same era of witch-panic, but played as pure tragedy instead of spectacle — it shows you what Häxan's material looks like with every drop of dark comedy drained out.

Carl Theodor Dreyer's tale of a woman accused of witchcraft in Reformation Denmark is agonisingly patient and morally serious — the sober, tragic mirror to Häxan's carnival tone.

But Very slow and very quiet, entirely without the earlier film's humour, shock value, or showmanship.

House1977

Nobuhiko Obayashi's anarchic slapstick-horror is proof that Häxan's own instinct — letting the terrifying and the ridiculous share a frame — became, decades later on the other side of the world, an entire aesthetic.

A Japanese haunted-house film so gleefully absurd — killer pianos, a demonic cat, blood-vomiting portraits — that it turns dread into pure delighted disbelief from start to finish.

But Deliberately silly and cartoonish; if you want anything resembling realism or restraint, look elsewhere.