Directed by Benjamin Christensen

Position on the list (at time of viewing): 897

In an interesting coincidence after our last review, this is another super weird combination of documentary and fictional film, although it’s a little more honest about its fictionalizations. This bizarre movie journeys through the historical representation and persecution of witches, but is replete with what might generously be called recreations of the beliefs of people about witches. These recreations, for all intents and purposes, play out like an actual horror film. This makes for a unique viewing experience that I struggle to find a comparison for.

It’s actually an astonishingly well-researched movie, firmly grounded in study of the Malleus Maleficarum and in contemporary (at the time) psychological theory, but actually watching it you’d be forgiven for forgetting all about that. Many of the scenes have the general air of a really weird, sexual fever dream. I think I can safely speak for my wife and me when I say that it was almost assuredly the most shocking film we had yet seen on the list. There is a surprising amount of nudity compared to most movies of the time, and some of the stuff related to the devil had us staring in actual disbelief. This movie was banned in the U.S., and heavily censored in most other countries around the world. It contains blunt depictions of torture and pretty explicit sexual perversion at the hands of the devil himself. To say that it’s unlike any movie before it kind of sells it short. All of it, of course, was pulled from the actual historic record, though, so it’s hard to call Christensen (an ironic name if ever there was one) exploitative or manipulative.

The film definitely doesn’t conjure the feeling of dread that Nosferatu or Dr. Caligari does, at least in part because of the narrator continuously tying us back to reality and science. Interspersed with most of the scenes are analytic segments discussing why these kinds of things happened. Mass hysteria, the stigmatizing of women, and other themes that we don’t often associate with the 1920s all feature in these discussions. Despite that academic tone, however, the movie’s narrative sections are almost purely in the realm of horror. While there still aren’t any jump scares to be found, the discussion is dropped for minutes at a time to present disturbing scenes of what people under the influence of Satan do in their downtime. It’s these scenes that really give the movie its lasting value, for the most part. Much of the documentary work has been superseded by new research, or has just become kind of assumed at this point. Most people are familiar, for example, with the idea that lynch mobs murdering witches was probably the result of mass hysteria. The horror scenes are timeless, though. There are quite a few of them that I remember clearly even a year after originally seeing the movie. The devil is such a deeply ingrained element of Western culture that these scenes, even silent, still resonate.

It’s also important to remember that this movie really broke new ground. Even if many of its ideas are old hat now, they weren’t at the time. Christensen was serious in his attempt to analyze. He wanted to dispel the illusions of what he saw as a superstitious and small-minded crowd. In that way, this is actually one of the first great works of secular humanism that we have in film. Christensen wanted to show that God and the devil had nothing to do with the persecution of countless innocent women, and to have a damn good time doing it, and he pulled it off. The movie manages to be both a serious analysis and an engaging thriller. It really rarely puts a foot wrong.

The movie definitely trails off toward the end as it gets further into discussion of psychological phenomena. Most of the really exciting content is front loaded into the beginning scenes. The whole movie is only a little more than an hour, though, so even its slower parts don’t really ruin the experience. Even taking its unevenness into consideration, though, this is an interesting film, and an exciting stop on the road toward actual documentary (which we still won’t have for a while). It’s exciting to watch a movie like this and to think of how boundless the creative space was back at the beginning of film. Only very rarely and very recently have we begun to push the boundaries of documentary and fictional film in a way that seems completely normal in the films of the 1920s. I’m thinking of last year’s American Animals, which basically does exactly the same thing as this movie with the documentary elements and then actors doing recreations. It felt fresh and new at the time, but Christensen was doing the same thing without even thinking about it almost a hundred years ago. This one is definitely worth a watch for just about anyone, at least once so you can marvel at its insanity.

Overall: