13 Nights of Shocktober: Haxan: Witchcraft Through The Ages

by A.J.

This is my favorite time of year, second only to Christmas. Autumn has arrived, the weather is cooling down, and, October becomes the month long celebration of scary movies called Shocktober. There are a lot of horror movies out there, but as a genre, horror is still looked down upon by some mainstream critics and moviegoers. It doesn’t help that, admittedly, there are so few quality horror movies made but, like comedy, it’s a very difficult and subjective genre. So, in the days leading up Halloween I’ll be posting some recommendations for scary movies to help you celebrate Shocktober.

Night 1: “There are witch confessions that are totally insane.” Haxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages

I first saw Haxan late one night on TCM. It’s one of those movies that you’ll want to watch with someone so there’s another witness to the crazy, bizarre, spooky, and oddly funny scenes that make up this silent movie. Haxan is a truly unique film: part documentary, part history lesson, part folklore study, part “reenactment” of witchcraft confessions, and part social commentary.

There are 7 chapters to the film, each showcasing a particular time period or aspect of the era of witchcraft. The first shows us pages of old books with macabre drawings of devils and witches and explains the belief system of the medieval period (the Earth was the center of the universe, surrounded by the planets, then spheres of angels with God in the 10^th sphere and Hell at the center of the earth). We see how the beliefs of the time let people draw the wrong conclusions to things they could not explain. For example, a pair of medieval doctors rob a grave to use the corpse to study anatomy. A peasant sees this and assumes they must be witches. Why else would someone cut open a corpse? From there the imagery only gets more bizarre and more macabre. There are witches flying through the air and devils and demons that look just like the grotesque, monstrous paintings of the medieval period, dancing and coercing people to do evil things. 

Chapter 4 has some of the craziest, goofiest, most disturbing, and creepiest things ever put on film. A woman is accused of being a witch and tortured until she gives a confession. What she confesses is in line with what we learned of common notions of witchcraft from the first chapter. The movie shows us what she confesses. We see a Witches’ Sabbath with devils and “witches” (medieval peasant women) dancing and writhing around together and witches lining up to kiss Satan’s behind to show respect. Chapter 6 shows us the instruments of torture used to get such outlandish confessions. None of the devices are actually used, but it is still unnerving to see a real hand or foot in a torture device and see how it is supposed to work. Chapter 7 is an interesting examination of how the modern era (of the 1920s) treats the behavior that used to be seen as a symptom of or caused by witchcraft.

Most scenes of Haxan are filtered either in red or blue which was not uncommon for silent films but works especially well for the eerie and creepy scenes of this movie. The creepiest part of the movie is easily Satan himself, done up in full body makeup like medieval portrayals with horns and long claws for fingers. It doesn’t help that he gesticulates and flicks his tongue wildly, either. In one scene he churns butter. In another, he clubs a nun over the head. Each scene is as bizarre and ridiculous as you might imagine. All of this is set to a score that fluctuates between being ominous and whimsical. The whimsy of the score and absurd nature of the scenes witchcraft and devils make this an unusually funny movie.  

Silent films usually get overlooked when people are searching for scary movies for October, but there are a lot of great ones, and Haxan is a spooky and interesting movie to start with.