On New York University Week: Witches have been fodder for horror movies for decades, but what started this trend?
Vito Adriaensens, assistant professor of experimental film and media at the Tisch School of the Arts, watched to find out.
Vito Adriaensens is a Belgian filmmaker and scholar, and an Assistant Professor of Experimental Film and Media at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
As a researcher, Vito works on the intersections of film, visual arts, and performance, with an emphasis on early cinema. He is a co-author of Screening Statues: Sculpture and Cinema (2017) and the author of Velvet Curtains and Gilded Frames: The Art of Early European Cinema (2023). Vito is currently also finishing a book on Benjamin Christensen’s 1922 silent film Häxan (or Witchcraft through the Ages) for the British Film Institute; editing the scholarly volume The Tableau Vivant: From Living Pictures to Moving Images for Edinburgh University Press; and writing From New Stagecraft to New Cinema: Silent Film Performs the Avant-Garde for Amsterdam University Press.
As a filmmaker, Vito works mainly on celluloid and teaches filmmaking at Brooklyn cinema-arts non-profit Mono No Aware. His experimental short films have exhibited and screened internationally and his first feature is the Metamorphoses-inspired, 35mm anthology film Ovid, New York (2024).
Haxan and Witchcraft through the Ages
“By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes”
This is what came to mind when I discovered a long-lost costume test for a film from around 1919 at the archives of the Danish Film Institute in Copenhagen, proving that it always pays to go digging.
Witches have haunted our collective imagination for thousands of years. From featured parts in Shakespeare, to starring roles in cinema.
One unsung masterpiece is the mother of all witchcraft films. It took a novel documentary approach, before documentary approaches in cinema really existed. Steeped in flawed scientific research of its day – including by Sigmund Freud – it dove deep into the disturbing trials and tribulations that women had to endure in the roughly 300 years of religiously-driven witch hunts in the Middle Ages.
80 years before the 1999 The Blair Witch Project traumatized a generation of millennials with blurry faux-documentary visuals from a Hi-8 video camcorder, Danish director Benjamin Christensen was given carte blanche and an enormous budget to create an epic silent documentary that still resonates today.
This film is Häxan, or Witchcraft through the Ages, released to great fanfare in 1922, but immediately censored or banned almost everywhere because of its scenes of torture, satanism, witchcraft, and its searing critique of the Catholic Church.
Benjamin Christensen pioneeringly populated the film’s nail-biting scenes with both seasoned actors and archetypal-looking amateurs. He himself cheekily played the Devil.
While modern for its time, in the age of pirated 16mm copies and duped VHS tapes it became a subversive cult relic, repurposed by a different generation every other decade. In spite of providing a historical road map for both the evolution of the horror film and the documentary, Häxan remains deeply underrated, and shrouded in plenty of mystery, waiting to be rediscovered.
