I didn't know what to expect when I first saw "Haxan". Its a silent documentary (kind of) on witchcraft which compares the phenomemon of witches and witch hunts to that of hysteria in the 1920s - the film was made in 1922. Although it starts off in a more straight-laced documentary fashion, showing historical illustrations of witches and other occult instances from as far back as the pharoahs egypt, the film soon veers into reconstructing the events with which it is most concerned - possession and interrogation, for example. It dramatizes medieval women making medicine, satanic rituals, a convent of possessed nuns dancing and kissing the devil's posterior. The director even jokes about the terrible confessions he managed to wring from one of his young actresses with a set of thumb-screws, the least of the torture devices explained in the film. "Haxan" then goes onto make a number of interesting points about how the fears and anxieties that led to witches and their persecution and those that lead to nervous breakdown and persecution of young women in the early twentieth-century reflect each other. To me, and I hope I don't sound too patronising, a number of the films arguments in this vein seem quite sophisticated for a film-maker to be making in 1922. The film and its director received belated fame after its re-release in 1941, something that seems to support this, and that it was way ahead of its time, in style and subject.

The film is funny, intelligent and interesting: well worth watching.

And this DVD edition includes two versions of the film: a time-corrected, clour-tinted, swedish version and a 1968, black and white re-release of the film narrated by William Burroughs and titled "Witchcraft Through the Ages". Both versions looked great on my TV.