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Benjamin Christensen (Denmark, 1879) was mostly an actor at the beginning of
his career.
The sinister atmospheres and surrealist camerawork of his thrillers
Det Hemmelighedsfulde X/ The Mysterious X (1914) and
Haevnens Nat/ Blind Justice (1916)
culminated with
Häxan/ Witchcraft Through The Ages (1922), a medieval-theme
fake documentary on witchcraft.
More importantly the film is a vast catalog of visual tricks to illustrate
what it ostensibly a horror movie, but the result is closer to Goya's
hallucinated and fantastic paintings and to Bruegel's opulent frescoes than to
the typical horror movie.
The narration is tedious and naive, but the visual effects are certainly groundbreaking.
The film begins with a sort of slide presentation of sorcery and
witchcraft through the ages, with colorful reproductions of
photographs, drawings and woodcuts. Included are animations of life in hell.
The second part is a film set in 1488. On a propitious night
an old witch is cooking a mysterious stew while a sorcerer prepares a potion
using a dead thief's finger, a frog and other ingredients
A woman walks in to ask the sorcerer, Karna, whether he can provide her with
a potion to make a pious church man to fall in love with her. He advises
cat feces and dove hearts. Later we see the woman serving food to the friar
and the friar getting horny.
Then we see two young men vivisecting a dead man and a
terrified woman who caught them in the act running away.
Then we see a drunkard insulting a woman and the woman casting a spell on
him so that his mouth will remain open for eternity.
Satan summons a woman who is sleeping naked next to her husband.
Satan takes an old drunk woman, Apelone, to a castle where she finds thousands
of coins, but she is unable to grab the coins. A door opens and the coins fly
away from her. She runs after them and ends up in a room where all sort of
food has been prepared ut she's unable to eat it.
Then she sees people dancing around a table but when she tries to join them
they leave and lock the door behind them.
The third section returns to the slide presentation, this time to show how
religious authorities were torturing and "punishing" witches.
The film then shows a fictitious witch trial.
Anna the wife of a printer who has suddenly fallen very ill is told by
a man, Peter (who behaves like a sorcerer himself), that the illness has been
caused by witchcraft. Peter's cryptic words led Anna to believe that
the witch is the old starving Maria, a poor weaver who lives next door.
Anna reports Maria to the Inquisition and Maria is seized and taken away.
Maria is tortured by Rasmus the executioner and finally confesses to being a witch and having attended satanic orgies (and the film shows us all of her
imagined evil deeds).
Maria takes revenge on the women who mistreated her by denouncing them as
women who kissed Satan's ass.
This begins a vicious cycle in which each accused witch accuses ten other women of being witches.
Soon, Anna too is accused of being a witch because one of the inquisitors felt heat and desire when she touched him.
Anna is tricked into confessing and then sentenced to be burned at the stake.
Two pig-faced humans guarding a door introduce the next section of the film,
which is basically a lecture on why so many women confessed to being witches.
The film graphically shows the cruelty of torture devices
Then it discusses the fear of the devil that drove pious people crazy in medieval times.
We see Satan possessing a nun, Cecilia, arming her with a knife, and forcing her to desecrate a chapel while the other nuns watch terrified.
Then Satan lures all the nuns to start laughing and dancing hysterically.
The film then comments that physical defects in old women were enough to
turn them into suspects.
The film then proposes that some women were convinced of being witches because
of mental disorders, and one actress plays such mentally disturbed women, starting with
a sleepwalker.
The film discusses hysteria (in unscientific terms not too different from
medieval superstition!) as the cause of many symptoms of witch behavior.
For example, in medieval times it was believed that that
the devil left his mark in parts of the body that were not sensitive,
and the film argues that the non-sensitive body parts are simply a side-effect
of hysteria.
The film warns that a hysterical woman can become a kleptomaniac and get in trouble with the law, and shows a sketch about a woman stealing in a jewelry shop,
being caught and begging the owner to forgive her since she is a war widow.
The film concludes that medieval superstitions about witches flying on broomsticks are ridiculous in the age of flying airplanes, but also hints that superstition is still very popular.
And that confining mentally ill people in mental institutions is as cruel as
burning them at the stake.
He later moved to
Hollywood and directed several horror movies, for example
Seven
Footprints to Satan (1929).
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