Häxan
Häxan is a 1922 film from Sweden and Denmark, directed by Benjamin Christensen, running 107 minutes. reelscum files it under classical exploitation and occult & satanic panic.
- Year
- 1922
- Country
- Sweden · Denmark
- Runtime
- 107 min
- Director
- Benjamin Christensen
- Updated
- 29 Oct 2026
- Obscurity
- known (16/100)
- Also known as
- The Witches · Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages · Witchcaft Through the Ages · Haxan
- Banned in
- United States
Defined in the glossary: Classical exploitation, Occult & satanic panic
Banned outright in the United States and heavily censored elsewhere for its nudity, torture imagery and treatment of the Church.
A 1922 documentary about witchcraft that is also a horror film. Way ahead of itself.
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.
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