Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Häxan
1922 · Benjamin Christensen · Häxan on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch for a pointer directly indicating details on old woodcuts. (structure)
Christensen presents diagrams and museum artifacts like a lecturer, addressing the viewer directly before the film shifts into dramatized scenes.
Payoff: The film argues its case in the open, more like an essay than a story. In the reading: the image of thought (noosign). The reading calls this a noosign: a film that thinks out loud, using the screen itself to reason toward an argument.
Watch faces emerge from deep shadow, lit by candle or firelight. (light)
Christensen and Ankerstjerne favor low-key lighting motivated by flames and lanterns within the frame, carving figures out of dense pools of black.
Payoff: The light itself feels sourced from the story's own world, not applied from outside it.
Notice the staging echo old paintings and woodcuts of hell. (setting)
Christensen built his tableaux directly from period images of witchcraft and damnation, giving the Sabbath scenes a hand-built, tactile materiality.
Payoff: You're watching centuries-old images get up and move, not modern effects standing in for them.
Watch Christensen play Satan with a grin instead of a snarl. (performance)
His Devil is sensual, mocking, and physically grotesque, tipping the film toward black comedy rather than straight dread.
Payoff: The humor doesn't undercut the horror. It makes the horror feel closer to how people actually experienced it.
Watch the old woman's face held in close, steady shots. (performance)
Christensen holds on Maren Pedersen's weathered features almost ethnographically, casting her for her face rather than for acting experience.
Payoff: Her stillness carries the film's pity in a way none of the dramatized horror can. In the reading: icon of quality (qualisign). The reading calls this a qualisign: an immobile face expressing one quality, here the human cost underneath the film's whole argument.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch for the pointer, then notice exactly where the film stops illustrating history and starts diagnosing you.