The cinematography of the 1920s returns in the summer cycle of the NFM Organ Cinema in the form of screenings with live music. The series of screenings will be opened by the Häxan from 1922, very important in the history of horror, the effect of the Swedish director Benjamin Christensen's exploration of the famous Malleus Maleficarum – The Hammer of Witches. The silent production shocked interwar audiences with its on-screen depiction of scenes of occult practices, torture, nudity and sex. Interestingly, we will see Christensen himself on the screen as the devil.
Häxan is not a feature film par excellence, but a cinematic black-and-white essay on the history of late-medieval trials of witches. The main thesis here is that the victims who were punished during such trials were in fact suffering from mental or neurological disorders and would not be sent to die at stake today but instead would be cared for. An ardent and not entirely reliable argument, presented out of necessity only in the intertitles, is a pretext for large-scale sequences that take the viewer into the darkness of the Middle Ages and present magical practices and attempts to eradicate them. It is these fragments that today determine the value of the production. We will see, for example, the brewing of a love potion from the bodies of hanged men, the devil tempting a woman while sleeping, the witches' sabbath, flying on a broom and kissing the devil's tail, as well as a trial conducted by the Dominican inquisitors, including torture. The plot of the over 100-year-old film impresses with the uncompromising nature of the production, as well as the set design and characterization made with great care. In the Häxan there is also a wealth of special effects made using the stop-motion technique. At the time of its production, it was the most expensive film ever made in all of Scandinavia!
The soundtrack to the film will be improvised live by organist Tomasz Głuchowski and DJ Michał Macewicz, who delighted the audience during last year’s show of Fritz Lang’s legendary Metropolis.