The Fright Life Ain't No Good Life

Häxan (1922)
directed by Benjamin Christensen
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

After yesterday's bloodletting on the The Bogdanovich Chorus, I needed a comedy. Was it witchcraft that kept me from watching Häxan on Halloween? Because Häxan isn't, appearances aside, a scary film. The abuses of power it "investigates" certainly spook, but a movie like Witchfinder General conveys the fears that must have accompanied those first accusations of heresy in small towns across haunted Europe much better.

Instead, Häxan wears its social agenda of a little empathy lightheartedly, sparing no expense on the phantasmagoria enlisted by imaginative minds to damn women across generations for their shameful witchy ways. Aside from illustrating the merits of careful restoration (the richness of the image here stands in remarkable contrast to the thrice-removed damage of the Nosferatu print a week back), Häxan is formally elegant and often very beautiful to behold. The gesture of the director's hands turning the pages of a thin book suggest Christensen's technical mastery - that lighting! - and the witches' sabbat, rooftop flights, and animal transformations enforce it.

The film is funny, too, as when Christensen implies Amelia Earhart's debt to Satan or experiments on his able actresses with Inquisition-era thumbscrews. "I will not reveal the terrible confessions I forced from the young lady in less than a minute," he grins through the title cards, and the sight of the young woman laughing good-heartedly at her ordeal is argument enough for the frail perfection of the entire medium.

The day sets early now (devils everywhere), so here's a little light to find your way home:



Thanks, as always, to Syl.