Häxan
Häxan (international title: Witchcraft Through The Ages), directed by Benjamin Christensen, is a 1922 Swedish/Danish movie often noted as either one of the first modern documentaries, an early horror movie, or one of the first exploitation films.
Ostensibly, it's a serious look at mediaeval superstition and the horriffic consequences thereof, and how we're not so very different today. It achieves this by showing etchings from mediaeval works about witchcraft, pictures of torture implements, and dramatised scenes of sorcery, black masses, inquisitions, and modern psychiatry, featuring plenty of Gorn and Fan Service.
The film is in the public domain and can be viewed here.
Contains examples of:
- Burn the Witch: Well, duh.
- Cold-Blooded Torture
- Eats Babies: One of the things believed to have happened at black masses.
- Enforced Method Acting: One of the actresses asked to try out a pair of mediaeval thumbscrews. Christensen was happy to film the experiment.
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I won't divulge any of the secrets I made the young lady tell me within less than a minute. |
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- Fan Service: A surprising amount of nudity for a 1922 film.
- Fan Disservice: A surprising amount of nudity by older women and men being tortured or dressed up like demons.
- Good Cop, Bad Cop: During the Inquisition era.
- Mockumentary
- Morton's Fork: The witch trials make heavy use of this.
- Not So Different: Mediaeval superstition about witches and demons is compared to then-modern views on mental illness.
- Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions
- Satan
- Shown Their Work: The film is largely based on the Malleus Maleficarum, faults and all.
- Wicked Witch: Deconstructed.