Häxan · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Häxan begins not with a story but with a lesson: the film opens by panning slowly across medieval woodcuts and illuminated manuscripts, treating the screen as a surface for thought rather than a stage for drama. This is noosign avant la lettre — the image organized as a brain working through a problem, not showing action but demonstrating an argument. Christensen inherited the deeper structural move from Griffith's Intolerance (1916): that montage can function as sustained thesis, cross-cutting discrete historical episodes — the Sabbath, the torture chamber, the convent of possessed nuns — into a single moral claim, here that what the Inquisition burned as witchcraft the asylum treated as hysteria, and that neither institution stops the cruelty. The lecture bleeds into the vignettes and the vignettes double back as evidence; the spectator is left to weigh what, if anything, has actually changed across centuries of persecution. What prevents the film from becoming a cold demonstration is mise-en-scène of volcanic intensity: Johan Ankerstjerne's low-key, directional lighting carves faces and figures from absolute darkness, candle-fire and shadow replacing close-up or color as the primary emotional register. The nightmarish Sabbath sequences owe their charge entirely to this sculptural chiaroscuro, a visual idiom Häxan shares with the contemporaneous Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), where designed shadow serves as the grammar of dread. The result is a film that moves between museum exhibit and gothic fever dream without losing its furious central point — that the machinery of institutional cruelty outlasts every doctrine invented to justify it.