Häxan

Häxan (1922) is a Swedish-Danish silent film directed by and starring Benjamin Christensen, available to watch online on iFILM. Split into seven parts, it moves between illustrated lectures on demonology and elaborately staged dramatic scenes — woodcut illustrations dissolve into actors, a horned devil grins at the camera, and accused women confess under conditions that look nothing like justice.

Christensen's central argument is unsettling and still holds: the women burned as witches in medieval Europe showed the same symptoms as patients in early twentieth-century psychiatric wards. The film doesn't let that stay abstract. It shows the torture instruments, the sabbath orgies, the hysterical fits — shot with the clinical eye of a documentarian who also clearly enjoyed the spectacle.

Produced over three years on an unprecedented budget for Scandinavian cinema at the time, the film was banned in several countries on release and didn't find wider audiences until decades later. Few silent films age this well precisely because Christensen wasn't making entertainment — he was making an argument. Watch Häxan (1922) online on iFILM.