Häxan

A 1922 Swedish-Danish film that is part documentary, part horror, and decades ahead of everything around it. Benjamin Christensen traces the history of witchcraft and then dramatises it in vivid, grotesque tableaux of sabbats, demons and torture, arguing that the witch trials were really a persecution of the mentally ill.

The imagery, Christensen himself as a lascivious Devil, is startlingly explicit for its era, and the film was banned and cut for decades. It works as both essay and nightmare, and nothing else from the silent period looks like it.

A genuine landmark, strange and unclassifiable a century on.