Häxan (1922)

★ 7.6 1h 45m IMDb

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.

Häxan

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Cast

Benjamin Christensen
Benjamin Christensen as Devil Died 1959 · Viborg, Denmark Benjamin Christensen (28 September 1879 - 2 April 1959) was a Danish film director, screenwriter and an actor both in film and on the stage. As a director he is most well known for the 1922 film Häxan...
Ella La Cour
Ella La Cour as Karna / Sorceress Died 1935 · Copenhagen, Denmark Ella la Cour (born Eleonora Caroline Møller) was a Danish actor who got her start in theater from 1873 to 1886. She starred in her first film production at Nordisk Film in 1908 and starred in approxi...
Kate Fabian
Kate Fabian as Old Maid Died 1929 · Copenhagen, Denmark Kate Fabian, born Anna Kathrine Georgine Fabing, was a Danish stage and screen actress..
Oscar Stribolt
Oscar Stribolt as Fat Monk Died 1927 · Copenhagen, Denmark From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Peter Oscar Stribolt (12 February 1872 – 20 May 1927) was a Danish stage and film actor of the silent era in Denmark. He worked prolifically under director Lau...
Astrid Holm
Astrid Holm as Anna Died 1961 · Sønder Bjerge Sogn, Sorø Municipality, Zealand, Denmark Born Astrid Vilhelmine Rasmussen in Sønder Bjerge Sogn, Sorø Municipality, Zealand, she was the daughter of hotelier Hans Peter Rasmussen and his wife Maren Sofie Rasmussen (née Larsen). She studied a...
Karen Winther
Karen Winther as Anna's Sister Died 1989 · Copenhagen, Denmark Karen Winther was a Danish actress active briefly in the 1910's and 1920's. She was the wife of acclaimed director, Benjamin Christensen, and starred in his experimental documentary-horror, Häxan..

Audience Reviews

CinemaSerf 7/10 Dec 31, 2024
Next time you look around and wonder where all the sparrows have gone, just be thankful you didn't live in a time where their bodies were pulverised to make a potion to ward off evil spirits! That's just one of the examples cited in this interestingly whacky look at all things devilish and malevolent. It's not the most rational of tours of the witching sorority, but it does by the end of the sixth chapter converge on quite a potent evaluation of the absurd, the terrifying, the superstitious and the religious and quite successfully demonstrates the plethora of overlapping philosophies, manipulative strategies and just plain scaredy-catness of mankind's behaviour when faced with things unknown and unpredictable. The rudimentary augmentation of human bodies with wings, horns, hooves - all illustrated here using quite an entertaining mixture of what looks like ancient scripture, coupled with some silent film footage and plenty of plasticine shows it wasn't just the uneducated classes who bought into all of this mysticism. It's accompanied by some quite pithy and informative, discursive even, inter-titles that try to balance between the silly and the serious and some of the characterisations are genuinely quite thought-provoking, especially as the church was often a prime mover in causing and/or dealing with the consequences of these fevered and violent old wives' tales. I can't say I could make sense of all of it, but I think that might have been auteur Benjamin Christansen's point as he opens a Pandora's Box and let's us do the heavy sifting. One man's witch is another man's nun!
patient1 8/10 Nov 05, 2025
The hysteria amongst people and the fervor they will use to explain the often unexplainable is powerful, and they don't shy away from the unpleasantness of Fear and Ignorance.

It really shows the Atrocities in the name of the church the Catholics were willing to use to spread fear amongst the uneducated masses for control over even their thoughts, not just their physical bodies.

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