Image courtesy Photofest, 212-633-6330

Economic downturns usually lead to rise of interest in the occult and supernatural, many of the top Rock/Indie songs of 2007 had the word ‘ghost’ in the title and last year marked the beginning of the recent vampire movie craze. Not suprising then that a film featuring witches prancing around butt naked, flirting with demons, and bringing forth deformed progeny from their unholy union, would attract a packed audience. Such was the case at last Wednesday’s Hammer showing of Haxan.  Made in the Golden Era of Silent movies, Haxan is a film that uses the term ‘documentary’ quite loosely. Director, Benjamin Christensen, employed a variety of techniques to tell his story including a slideshow of images (including the famous one of Pazuzu used in the opening scene of The Exorcist), stop-motion, and “historical re-enactments”. When it came to the “re-enactments” one finds Christensen repeatedly dipping into the well of fiction. Yet its all this and more that makes this film so extraordinary.

It’s also interesting to note that, Christensen’s film, which aims to show how human paranoia could lead to the outrageous acts of cruelty committed by the Inquisition, was undertaken only years after anti-Semite and Aryan Supremacist, Anton Drexler, formed the Nazi party which was to make the Inquisition look like a walk in the park.

Live accompaniment was provided by Eddie Ruscha (son of Ed Ruscha, and himself a talented artist and experimental electronic musician) with a piece he composed especially for this event. The music perfectly complemented the film and the hearty applause for the DJ at the end, shows that I was not alone in feeling so.

Since the film was in Swedish and lacking in subtitles, the English subtitles were projected manually onto the screen for the Swedish-impaired. This actually became a source of minor entertainment, seeing the poor person in charge of it trying to anticipate the intertitles, failing, then having to quickly take it off.

Haxan meaning “Witches” in Swedish tells its story seven chapters. The first called ‘Sources’, is told in slideshow format with facts being presented in a lecture type manner, a stick being used to point to things mentioned in the intertitles. (Very analog – I love it and only wish I were making a documentary so I could use it!) We’re educated on medieval cosmology and the early history of witchcraft and the inevitable clash of the two resulting in frightening tools of torture whose uses are shown. It’s here we’re first introduced to Christensen’s “behind-the-scenes” technique. He shows an actress who he says wanted to try out the thumbscrew and from whom he was able to force unspeakable confessions.

In the second chapter the “re-enactments” that are to take place in the rest of the film on elaborate sets by Richard Louw begin. We find ourselves in a witch’s lair, her henchmen (for what is an evil genius without henchmen) bring a freshly stolen dead body. But obviously not fresh enough the witch remarks after breaking off a finger. A customer visits seeking a love potion, fantasizing about its results. Then the is whisked off by the Devil to his lair where she’s enticed by the stop-motion dance of gold coins which scurry under the door when she attempts to gather them up.

Image courtesy Photofest, 212-633-6330

The Inquisition features in the third and fourth chapters. Using the story of a dying man whose wife reports a beggar as having bewitched her husband. Horrible torture engenders false confessions of flying on a broom to the Witches’ Sabbath (an effect achieved by superimposing actors shot against black, on footage of a miniature town on a turntable) where unspeakable acts were committed. Acts such as desecrating the cross, dancing nude with demons, kissing the Devil’s behind and then giving birth to monstrous demonic offspring. But the tables turn when the old woman accuses her accuser as a witch as well. And so the Inquisition storms across Europe holding up false confessions as proof their work was sorely needed – an early form of job security.

The evil penetrates the hallowed halls of the monasteries and convents in chapters five and six. A young priest’s pangs of lust causes his object of desire to blamed for enchanting him. Nuns go all out kooky seized the hysteria. Not shown, since it would never have made it past censors, was the remedy entailing filling a syringe with holy water and flushing the nun’s privates out. Crazy AND raped with Holy Water – What did a girl have to do to get a break in those days!

The final chapter brings the story into present day 1922 with the story of a kleptomaniac who’s caught and sent to a sanitarium. The time of superstition is past, this is how we deal with mental disease now. Some of the parallels are far fetched but I believe still entertaining especially looking at it from the distance of time.

Filmed on sets like many films of the time, Christensen still chose to shoot mostly at night to create that morbid mood. He used a large amount of close ups, not normal back then (film still having the stylistic norms of the stage) since it seemed unnatural to have the so large on the screen.

Image courtesy Photofest, 212-633-6330

The film became a favorite of the Surrealist, and in the ‘60s most of the intertitles were taken out, and narration by William S. Burroughs, and an acid-jazz soundtrack added. It became famous on campuses, where no doubt its watching was accompanied by a sizeable amount of illicit drugs. Haxan’s influence is noted in films such as Luis Bunuel’s, L’age d’or and the production company in Blair Witch Project was called Haxan.

This screening was part of an artist-curated exhibit done by Francesca Gabbiani (up at the Hammer till May 24th) of illustrations and books etc. that have something to do with the occult. Gabbiani has done work influenced by scenes from 60′s and ‘70s Italian horror films and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and was elated to curate three nights of exhibit-related films, shown at the Hammer’s, Billy Wilder theater.

Click here to see clips from the movie on YouTube.