Review of Häxan (1922) by Tim H — 06 Aug 2008

This is the one that shocks everyone.

I really thought I would dig the hell out of this movie. I would like to preface that, because God, Fate, or Time has been bounching me around to subgenres of films without my outright participation or cooperation. It just so happened that now I'm on the creepy devil genre. Right before this, I watched The House of Exorcism and the the episode of Bones that I ran to involved witchcraft. Let's just say that I got a lot of devil movies in a short period of time and none of them were really that exceptional.

The main problem that I had with Haxan was the fact that it wasn't really a story. It was meant to be kind of documentary, but that isn't exactly accurate as well. The film starts off with a fairly straightforward documentary mentality, showing images with explanations to how they fit in human history. But then the movie that we know as Haxan takes over, and that's where things get ambiguous. Since (clearly) the filmmakers couldn't get footage from the 1400's , they decide to film their own 1400's witchcraft examples. The only trouble is that instead of using short segments to supplement their facts (similar to historical reenactments on the History Channel), these segments form their own story without any character development or plot. It's really just a "that's what happened, folks" for a good period of time. Now, I was hoping for documentary-style or film-style, but toeing the line between both is very awkward (and unfortunately) a little boring for m.e.

Now, it's not that I have a problem with silent films. Hell, I love quite a few silent films. To make things fair, the film-style is actually extremely impressive at times. The demons are actually quite demonic and the costumes and sets are as elaborate as can get, especially considering that the movie came out in 1922 (not 1929, Flixster.) Christensen does a fantastic job of showing both sides of the argument. It implies that there may be some reality to all of the witchcraft while showing the mania that surrounded the persecution of innocents in the name of religion and Christianity. That stuff is extremely cool looking. I was more amazed with the time and effort (and, admittedly, nudity) that went into this 1922 recreation of the 1400's. Really, what I'm commenting on is the production value of this movie. Spared no expense, I tell you!

But at the end of the day, you are watching a pretty lame documentary with some pretty tedious reenactment. The worst part, actually, is the documentary stuff because (due to the silent era) you have to sit through this slideshow with long cuts of the image and then a pencil or another object is used to point out what you are meant to look at. Then you go to a card explaining and then you go back to the exact same image. How dull is that? I've seen and loved silent documentaries (Nanook of the North is fantastic. But this movie has a lot going against it. Originally, I was going to completely bash Criterion too for putting a really inappropriate classical piece over the footage, but apparently that was the original music used at the premiere and that makes me even more mad at this movie. The thing is that the classical pieces are intentionally synced up to certain parts of the movie which makes me question what Christensen was thinking.

Trust me, this isn't the demonic thrillride you think it might be. It is actually a slow, and sometimes very tedious look at witchcraft in the 1400's. Yeah. That's what I'm saying.