Film

Häxan

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 rating3.8

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you love silent cinema that mixes scholarly lecture with lurid, inventive set pieces, and you enjoy a film that is strange, funny and unsettling in equal measure, much like Nosferatu's brooding pictorial menace.

Skip it if you need a coherent narrative drive, since it moves through separate vignettes and essay-like chapters, and the silent-era acting and intertitles can feel stagey and slow to modern eyes.

What it asks of you: It runs about an hour and forty-five minutes and asks you to accept a lecture-like structure, with long stretches of explanation broken by sudden, grotesque images that arrive without much warning.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

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 Witch poster

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.

The Devils poster

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.

Witchfinder General poster

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Häxan

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.

The Act of Killing poster
More like this (8)

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.

Nosferatu poster

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 Passion of Joan of Arc poster

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.

The Wicker Man poster

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.

Suspiria poster

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.

Midsommar poster

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.

A Field in England poster

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.

Day of Wrath poster

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.

House poster

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Recommended by

The Wicker Man, The Witches, The Witch, Practical Magic 2, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, My Life as a Turkey, The Exorcist, Apostle, The Miracle Man, Day of Wrath, I Married a Witch, Dr. Cyclops, The Man Who Saved the World, Three Ages, Onibaba, Way Down East, Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages, The Devil Rides Out, The Scarecrow, Belladonna of Sadness, Witchfinder General, Vampyr, A Florida Enchantment, Into the Inferno, Die Nibelungen: Siegfried, Mark of the Devil, The Great Gabbo, The Bat Whispers, The Cave of the Silken Web, The Dictator, One A.M., Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness, The Phantom Carriage, The Man Who Laughs, The Long Hair of Death, The Thief of Bagdad, Testament of Orpheus, The Black Cat, Pandora's Box, L'Atlantide, Werewolf by Night, A Page of Madness, Under Two Flags, The Night Before Christmas, The Haunted House, The Bottle Imp, The Loves of Pharaoh, The Conquest of the Pole, Conquest, Maciste in Hell, Cabiria, The Sinking of the Lusitania, Salome, Snow-White, Swing You Sinners!, Equinox, The Fall of Babylon, 1,000,000 A.D. Promo Reel, Ashes of Vengeance, Sparrows, The Spy Next Door, Fires of Fate, The Haunted House, Atlantis, Adventures of Captain Marvel, The Ghoul, Alias Nick Beal, Girl Shy, Blacksmith Scene, Bimbo's Initiation, The Magician, L'Argent, The Ten Commandments, The Devil's Possessed, The Juniper Tree, The Master Mystery, Tarzan of the Apes, The Leopard Woman, Hell-Bound Train, The Son of Tarzan, The Reckoning, The Magic Sword, Suspense, An Unseen Enemy, Lost in Alaska, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, In Old California, The Tales of the Thousand and One Nights, Shiraz: A Romance of India, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court