Häxan

• Christensen sourced the film from the Malleus Maleficarum, the 15th-century witch-hunting manual he found in a Berlin bookshop in 1919, then spent two years building his re-creations from period woodcuts and treatises.
• It cost between 1.5 and 2 million Swedish kronor, making it the most expensive Scandinavian silent film ever produced to that point. Censorship blocked it from earning that money back.
• Christensen cast himself as the Devil, the tongue-wagging horned figure prowling the sabbath sequence.
• He insisted on shooting at night wherever possible to hold the dark tone, racking up overtime costs for cast and crew.
• American censors banned it outright for nudity, torture, and blasphemy. The widespread cuts to its torture instruments and demonic-orgy footage meant Svensk Filmindustri couldn't recover its budget.
• In 1968 distributor Antony Balch re-cut it to 76 minutes as 'Witchcraft Through the Ages,' narrated by William S. Burroughs over a jazz score featuring Jean-Luc Ponty on violin.

The seventh chapter isn't a cop-out epilogue, it's the whole argument. By cross-cutting the tortured medieval 'witch' with the 1921 woman diagnosed with hysteria and kleptomania, Christensen frames both as the same act: men with institutional power pathologizing women they can't control. The Devil and the doctor are the same authority wearing different costumes.

The documentary frame is a Trojan horse. Christensen opens with a sober lecture-with-pointer pose to earn the audience's trust as scholarship, then uses that credibility to smuggle in the most lurid sabbath imagery he can stage. The 'cultural history lecture' framing is exactly what let the orgy and torture scenes pass as education rather than spectacle, which is also why censors weren't fooled.

The old weaver Maria reads as the film's real horror engine: under torture she names other women, and the camera shows the confession spreading like contagion. The terror isn't the supernatural at all, it's the mechanical certainty that pain manufactures whatever confession the inquisitor already wants to hear.

Benjamin Christensen builds his witch-history out of woodcuts and lecture-pointer scholarship, then detonates the format. Across seven chapters he stages the medieval imagination at full tilt: a sick man's family buys love potions from a hag, the Inquisition tortures confessions out of an old weaver, and a nighttime sabbath churns with babies, broomsticks, and a leering horned Devil. Then the floor drops out. The final chapter drags the whole spectacle into 1921, recasting the burned witch as the modern hysteric, the kleptomaniac, the grieving widow. Same woman. Different century's name for her.