Haxan- A 100 Year Retrospective

 

Haxan (Witchcraft Through the Ages)

1922

From Sweden /Denmark

Director- Benjamin Christensen

Cast- Benjamin Christensen, Clara Pontoppidan, Oscar Stribolt, Astrid Holm, Maren Pedersen

            Haxan is a sort-of documentary. It takes a scholarly look at the view of witchcraft in the middle ages but mixes in haunting and unsettling imagery that is comparable to the best horror movies.

            Those silent films that have stood the test of time have done so not because of the writing or acting but because of the imagery. This movie is a hundred years old but the effects hold up because, unlike CGI that doesn’t age very well, they rely on make-up and photography. The devil (played by the director himself) is especially scary with his perpetually flicking tongue and gleeful expression,

            The first fifteen minutes or so is rather boring, being filled mainly with images of medieval engravings but stick with it because the movie takes off after that.

            The movie was censored or banned in several countries, including the United States.  It takes a dim view of humanity. Those that fear the devil seem to do so out of backwardness and stupidity but those that serve the devil do so out of lust and greed.  The church is naturally lumped in with this.  Clergy are presented as just as stupid and lustful as their flock, perhaps even more so.

            But again, it is the images not the plot, that leave a lasting impression; Satan tempting a young woman as she lies next to her husband, a witches Sabbath where they sacrifice and eat a baby, a skeletal horse, witches flying through the air, grotesque demons prancing about in an orgy, women lining up to literally kiss the devil’s ass, a young monk orgasmicly enjoying a flagellation and Satan tempting a nun to defile a Eucharist wafer.

            The end of the film slows down as it tries to explain the demonic possessions of the middle ages as modern day mental illness, but it’s difficult to reconcile that with the utter realism with which the film depicts its diabolical subjects.

            The film was re-presented in 1968 with a narration by William Burroughs. The narration adds to the film but the jazz musical score, though adding to the mood in places tends to distract at other times. This version is shorter than the original but I think that’s a product of the narration being quicker than reading as it retains all the imagery of the original.

100 Years Later

            Haxan premiered  in September 1922. Now a century out, the question is, is it still relevant? I would say that it’s at least as relevant as it was a hundred years ago, perhaps more so.

            A hundred years ago the world was about 2 years removed from a global pandemic that killed tens of millions of people. Russia was engaged in a civil war brought on by the Bolshevik Revolution. The world was about 7 years away from the Great Depression. In response to this chaos, fascism spread through the world as people begged for someone to take charge of their lives. Any of this sounding familiar?

            Beyond the current events, we seem to be entering into a kind of New Dark Age. The rejection of science and critical thinking, in favor of emotion and wishful thinking, is a trend that started growing in the United States about 20 years ago and is now spreading to the rest of the world.  Believing what can be supported has been rejected for believing what makes us feel good. This same devaluing of knowledge is what led to the Dark Ages that took Europe a thousand years to climb out of.

            One thing that has changed in the last hundred years is the general perception of witchcraft. When most people see witchcraft now it’s in tandem with Wiccans worshiping nature or someone peddling their grandmother’s home remedy for sore throats. Most people aren’t living in fear of Satanic conspiracies spreading through their neighborhood, though if you remember the 1980s, that was an irrational belief that was perpetuated without a shard of evidence.

On the other hand, maybe society has outgrown witches. Maybe black cats and pointed hats have become quaint. Conspiracy theories have replaced church doctrine and members of the opposing political party have become the unseen threat seeping into our daily lives.

            Of course, that’s all pretty heavy, maybe too heavy for the first time viewing of a silent film. Does Haxan entertain? Haxan won’t scare a modern audience. But it will definitely show you images that you will never forget and give the viewer an appreciation for the art of fine film making before the modern era of special effects. Students of films or aspiring filmmakers will certainly appreciate the careful crafting of effective, realistic, creepy imagery.

Want more? Read about the role of The Devil in film.

Still want more? Check out the review of Faust, a German film made around the same time as Haxan.

Santa Claus (Santa Claus vs. the Devil)

  

  

Santa Claus (Santa Claus vs. the Devil)

1959

Director- René Cardona

Cast- José Elías Moreno, Cesáreo Quezadas, José Luis Aguirre, Armando Arriola, Lupita Quezadas, Antonio Díaz Conde, Ángel Di Stefani

From Mexico

            

     Santa Claus, rather than living in the North Pole, lives is a floating castle in space.  From there, with an international cadre of children from around the world, he makes toys. The children are all dressed in their culturally appropriate (some might stereotypical) attire with the Japanese kids wearing kimonos, the Mexican kids wearing sombreros etc.

            

     Satan, meanwhile, wants to show the world that he is its master and wants to use Christmas time to do it. He orders one of his minions, a lesser devil named Pitch, to ascend to Earth and tempt all of the children into Evil. His punishment for failure is that he has to eat ice cold chocolate ice cream, and this scares Pitch pretty bad as he seems to have some kind of digestive disorder.  Pitch begs for mercy “by the horns of everything Satanic”. With the command “Demons of Hades, transport me to Earth,” he teleports from Hell to begin his mission.

            

     Pitch initially doesn’t have a hard time as the Christmas season naturally brings out avarice. He immediately turns 3 rude brothers against Santa. Through some kind of sympathetic magic, by throwing rocks at a fake Santa they actually hurt the real Santa. Old St. Nick says that he could make short work of the Devil, but he can only descend to Earth one night a year. Santa plans to use the good children as his proxys in the war against Evil and uses his sophisticated intelligence gathering machines to locate good children. One machine has a prehensile eyeball on the end of a wire; another is a large ear on a satellite dish; one has a large red mouth like a sex doll.

         

   

   He locates the virtuous Lupita, who really wants a doll, any doll, for Christmas, but is very poor. Pitch tempts her to steal the doll, but to no avail. Santa uses his “Dreamscope” to peer into the unconscious mind of Billy, a rich boy, who only dreams of having the love of his parents.  Ever the voyeur, Santa decides to peep into Lupita’s dreams as well. Pitch is influencing her by making her dream of creepy life size rag dolls that dance around and tell her to steal. Santa’s voyeurism backfires when he spies on the 3 rude boys as they are talking about how old Santa is. Santa declares that he is much younger than the Devil, only that he has been sick lately.

            

      Of course even with the War on Evil underway, Santa still has a job to do and is inundated with letters from kids (which come via an airway that blows them up from Earth). One kid is after my own heart and asks for “a toy automobile, a submarine, a football, a bat, roller skates, a scooter, a cannon, a bicycle, an atomic laboratory, a machine gun.” The kid’s got some wild holiday plans!

           

     Santa is aided in his work by Merlin the Magician who has a lab in Santa’s palace. He concocts the magic potions that allow Santa to disappear and make children sleep. I guess today they would just use Ambien. Merlin seems a bit absent minded and it’s a wonder that he can concoct anything. He is also aided by the Roman god Vulcan, who constructs a key for Santa that will open any door. You know, when you think about it, the ability to get into any house and make children sleep is the kind of thing that would get you placed on a watch list today, one of those lists where you have a sign in your front yard and you can’t be within 100 yards of a school.

           

    Well, Christmas Eve arrives and Santa’s international coalition of children loads up his interstellar sleigh. Despite the fact that his mechanical reindeer can traverse the vacuum of space, they have to return by dawn because sunlight turns them into dust, because, sure, why not.

           

     Back on Earth, the three hooligans are still plotting against Santa. They plan to ambush him, take the toys, and make Santa their slave! These are some bad kids. Lupita is starting to think that Santa doesn’t like her as she always asks for the doll but never gets it.

       

      Pitch tries to prevent Santa from entering a house by moving the chimney (???) but it doesn’t faze Santa as he has a magic parasol to help him drop safely off the roof where he can enter the house in a more conventional way. Foiled, Pitch shifts fire to the next house where he tries different tactics but Santa outsmarts him again and humiliates Pitch by shooting him in the butt with a toy cannon.

            

       Santa stops at little Billy’s house. Billy is all alone because his parents are out at a fancy restaurant. But no worries, Santa shows up dressed as a waiter and gives his parents special drinks that make them remember that their child is at home (which is kind of depressing).

           

     Pitch and the 3 hooligans are still hoping to thwart Santa and they camp out on a roof top. They are having no luck with Santa so Pitch makes the children turn on each other and fight, much to his delight. He keeps a look out, and while Santa is in a home, Pitch tries to steal Santa’s sleigh! The robot reindeer won’t answer to his command so Pitch satisfies himself by sabotaging Santa’s magical gear.

            

      Pitch sics a vicious dog on Santa, and without his magical gear, Santa has no choice but to escape up a tree. Pitch then visits the locals in their sleep, telling them that Santa is a murderer and that they should arm themselves and kill him! Stuck up a tree with armed villagers, the police and fire department all converging on his location.  Surely Santa is doomed.

     

     Thankfully, Merlin pulls his fat out of the fire by advising Santa to use a toy cat from his bag to distract the dog. Santa escapes just before the cops arrive, but with the dawn quickly approaching, he still has one more stop.  Lupita has just about given up hope, but she gets her doll and Santa returns to his space castle!

           

     This movie is just as bizarre as it sounds. To its credit, despite all of the disparate elements crammed together into 94 minutes, it doesn’t come across like some disjointed hallucinatory William Burroughs novel. Christmas is a rather strange holiday. Christian mythology, pagan imagery, folk lore and greedy commercialism combine with messages of morality and spiritualism to create this bizarre annual amalgamation of traditions and religion. This movie does the same thing in a very fun, unself-conscious way. The plot is less like a movie script and more like a story being told by a child that is making it up as they go.

            

     Despite the bright lights and shiny wrapping paper, Christmas always has a dark side, at least for children. Guilt and shame over being naughty, combined the with the fear of being caught lend a somber morality to the holiday that only children can understand. What better way to portray that than with an actual devil walking among the children, tempting them toward their doom.

             

     This was directed by the same man that gave us Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Mummy so that should tell you something. Highly recommended for anyone wanting a unique experience.

BONUS- If you are looking for more sinister stories of children being tempted by Evil, check out these two Disney films, Something Wicked this Way Comes and The Devil and Max Devlin.

 

FAUST

Faust

1926

Director- F.W. Murnau

Cast-  Gösta Ekman, Emil Jannings, Camilla Horn, Frida Richard

            

   Faust is the archetypal story of the deal with the Devil. It has been passed down and re-interpreted for hundreds of years, entering our modern lexicon as a Faustian bargain. F.W. Murnau, the genius behind the eternally creepy Nosferatu took a swing at the centuries old tale, in this, his last film before he left Germany for Hollywood.

The movie begins with Satan and (what I assume is) the angel Michael making a wager about the fate of the Earth (not sure how God would feel about Mike gambling with the Earth but whatever). If Satan can corrupt the soul of Faust, he wins the Earth. If he doesn’t win, well he’s already in Hell, so I guess he’s playing with house money.

To set the stage, Satan, in the form of Mephistopheles, sends a plague and then tempts Faust with the power to cure it. Though tempted, Faust is reluctant to fully give himself over to the dark lord. Mephisto then offers Faust a trial offer; complete access to the Devil’s reality altering power for 24 hours. At the end, if Faust isn’t interested, he can go free. Of course, Old Scratch turns up the heat on the temptation. The next thing he offers is a sexy woman (it was quite surprising to see a nude woman considering such sights would be banned from Hollywood within a few years).

The Devil really gets Faust’s attention when he gives him a chance to return to his youth, in a rather lengthy scene where Fust time travels to his old home town. Faust sees a beautiful young girl, Gretchen, and Mephisto offers to deliver her via an enchanted necklace. The film really slows down here and gets off track at times such as when Mephisto is trying to get Gretchen’s aunt drunk (or horny I’m not sure).

The Devil makes sure that Gretchen’s affair with Faust is discovered and she is shamed as a harlot in front of her entire village. Nine months later (though the 24 hours is still not up on Faust, Satan can alter the space-time continuum and why not), she is homeless and alone, having just given birth to the bastard child of her and Fast. Shunned by the townsfolk, and despondent, Gretchen murders her child in a moment of lunacy. Though the villagers wouldn’t lift a finger to help the child when it lived, they are eager to execute Gretchen for its death (typical). Faust uses the last of his power and races through time for one last embrace with Gretchen as she burns on the stake.

The Devil shows up to Heaven to claim his reward of the Earth but it seems Michael is reneging on the deal on the grounds that Faust did all of this for love, so it’s OK.

Despite the hokey ending and the soap opera direction it takes about half way through, this movie is highly recommended for fans of the Prince of Darkness for its stunning visuals. The first 40 minutes of the film is the most metal thing you will ever see; a giant, winged Satan, spreading his black wings over a town, the horsemen of the Apocalypse riding through the sky, Faust in a summoning circle calling up the devil.

Interestingly, Emil Jennings (the actor who played Mephisto and was also the winner of the Best Actor award in the very first Academy Awards) seems to have struck a Faustian bargain himself. When Hitler came to power, Jennings starred in several Nazi propaganda films. While this helped him during the Reich’s reign, after the war he was virtually unemployable.

The 7th Victim

The 7th Victim

1943

Director- Mark Robson

Cast- Kim Hunter, Tom Conway, Hugh Beaumont,  Erford Gage, Jean Brooks

           

This movie, about a girl trying to find her sister, is interesting not only for its plot but also because of its cast. It was produced by horror great Val Lewton (Isle of the Dead, I Walked with a Zombie) and is related to another Lewton pic (Cat People) through a shared character. It was the directorial debut for Mark Robson, who would later be nominated for an Oscar for Peyton Place.

            Mary is looking for her sister ,Jaqueline, whom no one has heard from in months. Her search leads her to Greenwich Village. She finds a lot of people who know Jaqueline but no one seems to know where she is. We hear a lot about what an impression Jaqueline makes. Mary’s search leads her to three men; a lawyer who was married to Jaqueline (played by Hugh Beamont, famous as the father Ward Cleaver in Leave it to Beaver , just let that sink in for a minute) ,a psychiatrist (Tom Conway, who played the same role in Cat People) and a down and out poet (Erford Gage).

            Mary’s search eventually reveals that Jaqueline has gotten involved with a group of “devil worshipers”, the Palladists (an actual 19^th century Satanic cult). It’s interesting to note the film never uses the term “Satanists”. Jaqueline has broken the cults code by talking to her psychiatrist about them and now they have declared she must die. Jaqueline doesn’t appear until the final quarter of the film, but when she does appear, the film changes its focus from Mary to Jaqueline in a way that is either jarring or disjointed depending on your perspective.

       Hollywood didn’t start exploring Satanism en masse until the 1960s so this movie was pretty far ahead of its time. Although it’s very moody in places, it still feels like a movie from the 1940s and doesn’t have the stylishness of horror movies that would come later. However, it also lacks the sensationalism of the 1960s. The devil worshipers wear regular clothing not black robes and rather than a pentagram, their occult symbol is double triangle within a parallelogram.

            Kim Hunter (who played the main character, Mary) may not be immediately recognizable but she had a long genre career. She played Zira in the first three planet of the apes movies and was also in the 1980s horror film The Kindred (that’s a long career!) .On the other hand, Erford Gage (the poet) had a very short career. He joined the Army and died liberating the Philippines from the Japanese. Jean Brooks, who plays the mysterious Jaqueline, died young from alcoholism. This is a bit ominous given that her character in the film was suffering from depression.

            If you are wanting thrills and chills, this film won’t deliver. However, if you want a thoughtful film with a good cast, that was 20 years ahead of its time, check this out.

Night of the Demon

Night of the Demon

1957

Director- Jacques Tourneur

Cast- Dana Andrews, Peggy Cummins, Niall MacGinnis

            Not to be confused with the similarly titled 80s B-movie, Night of the Demons, this movie is a thoughtful examination of the occult in the same vein as The Devil Rides Out.

            Dana Andrews plays Dr. John Holden, an investigator of the occult who is a skeptic that likes to debunk superstitions. He has arrived in England to join a group investigating a Crowleyesque cult leader Dr. Julian Karswell (wonderfully played by Nial MacGannis). The problem is that Holden’s predecessor was murdered by a demon sent by Karswell to eliminate anyone who opposes him. Entered into this is the murdered man’s niece (played by Peggy Cummins) who is not nearly so skeptical as Dr. Holden.

            Early in his investigation, Holden is confronted by Karswell. When Holden refuses to back down, Karswell puts a hex on him that will kill him in a few days’ time. Holden and Karswell cross paths a few more times as the night of the demon draws closer.

            Nial MacGinnis’ portrayal of a cult leader makes this film. Genre fans will recognize him as the benevolent Zeus from Ray Harryhausen’s Jason and the Argonauts. He’s not a hissable villain, in fact, he is quite likable. He doesn’t present with any of the ominous theatrics of Anton LeVay. Rather he seems pleasantly matter of fact about the whole business.

            Night of the Demon, like The Witches(1966) poses the question does the supernatural have sway over us because of its intrinsic power or because of the power we grant it through belief? Unlike The Witches, which never answers the question, Night of the Demon comes down clearly on the side of the supernatural. The titular demon was originally never supposed to be shown which would have made the movie’s message much more ambiguous. However, the producer went over the head of the director and had it inserted. I hate to say it, but the producer was right because the demon effects look pretty good for when this movie was made, and probably added to the movie being so memorable.

 If looking for this film, be aware to avoid the American release, retitled as Curse of the Demon. That film had 12 minutes chopped out of it to speed up the pace. Stick with original.