To call Häxan a film is an almost blasphemous oversimplification. What the Danish director Benjamin Christensen unleashed upon the world in 1922 is not a cinematic work in the conventional sense of the term; it is a filmic grimoire, a visual essay, a hallucinatory academic lecture, a warped documentary that contorts itself into pure cosmic horror. To watch Häxan today is to immerse oneself in a cultural artifact so anomalous and ahead of its time it seems to have dropped in from an alternate future, one in which cinema, instead of following the path of classical narrative, took the winding trail of the occult, of anthropological dissertation, and of phantasmagoria.

Its structure, divided into almost encyclopedic chapters, immediately betrays its didactic intent. Christensen, a meticulous scholar first and a director second, takes us by the hand and leads us on a journey through the cosmology of witchcraft, from ancient Babylonian concepts to the throbbing heart of darkness of the late European Middle Ages. The first part is a visual treatise, a series of animated slides illustrating demons, planets, and the conceptual architecture of ancestral fear. But this is merely the appetizer. The true diabolical banquet begins when Christensen abandons illustrations and decides to dramatize the Sabbath, the confessions, the tortures, basing his scenes on historical documents and, above all, on the engravings from the Malleus Maleficarum.

And it is here that Häxan transcends its form to become an unprecedented visual experience. The Sabbath sequences are a pictorial delirium that seems to have sprung from an impossible collaboration between Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and the darkest caprices of Goya. Christensen, who himself plays a sardonic and strangely captivating Satan, orchestrates a symphony of the grotesque and the blasphemous. Witches kiss the Devil's posterior, newborns are sacrificed, potions bubble, and demonic creatures with pig snouts and forked tongues dance an infernal jig. For 1922, the level of detail in the costumes, makeup, and special effects is something both miraculous and terrifying. This is not the stylized Gothicism of German Expressionism, its contemporary—there is none of the geometric abstraction of a Caligari or the spectral elegance of a Nosferatu. Here, there is flesh, mud, sweat. Christensen’s witchcraft is not a metaphysical shadow, but a physical, dirty act, almost peasant-like in its carnality, an explosion of repressed instincts that finds its catharsis in the nocturnal rite. It is an aesthetic we would rediscover, through winding paths, decades later in Pasolini's Trilogy of Life, with its celebration of a corporeal and unfiltered Middle Ages.

But Christensen's undertaking is infinitely more complex and meta-textual. The director does not simply show; he constantly reflects on the power of the image itself. By staging the fantasies and fears described in inquisitors' manuals with philological scruple, he is not validating witchcraft but exposing the mechanism through which belief is constructed and perpetuated. He shows us torture as a theatrical machine for extracting predetermined narratives, confession as a performative act. In this sense, Häxan is an inadvertent precursor to the mockumentary and even found footage: it feigns documentary authenticity to reveal the constructed nature of "truth." It is a film about credulity, and the first to be called upon to believe is the viewer.

The stroke of genius, however, arrives in the final segment. After having completely immersed us in the medieval belief system, Christensen makes a dizzying temporal leap to the present day of 1922. He shows us modern women suffering from "hysteria," kleptomania, and somnambulism. Through a series of visual and didactic parallels, the director advances a bold and profoundly modern thesis: the so-called witches of yesteryear were none other than people suffering from mental illness, misunderstood and persecuted by a society that medicalized deviance through the theology of the demonic. The flying broomstick becomes a Freudian phallic symbol, the pact with the devil a sublimation of repressed desires. Häxan thus transforms into an essay in comparative psychopathology, a work in direct dialogue with nascent psychoanalysis and the theories of Charcot at the Salpêtrière.

This final move recontextualizes the entire film. The demonic orgies we have just witnessed are no longer just a historical reenactment, but a visualization of the collective unconscious, the mental theater of an era. The film becomes a psychoanalytic session for History itself. Christensen is not ridiculing medieval faith with the arrogance of modern science; on the contrary, he is suggesting that our own "scientific" understanding might be just another belief system, another way of labeling and controlling the unknown, the irrational, the deviant feminine. The inquisitor with his manual and the psychiatrist with his DSM are not so far apart. It is an insight of terrifying lucidity, anticipating by decades the thought of Foucault on the history of madness and the power structures that define normality.

Censored, mutilated, and misunderstood upon its release, Häxan has lived many lives. It has been an exploitation film screened on the grindhouse circuits, an art film rediscovered by the Surrealists, and even the basis for a 1968 psychedelic version, Witchcraft Through the Ages, narrated by a William S. Burroughs in a state of grace and scored by a jazz quintet. This polymorphous nature is the definitive proof of its greatness. It is not a film archive relic, but a living organism that continues to mutate in meaning with every viewing. It is a film that poses a fundamental and timeless question: where does reality end and our representation of it begin? By showing us hell on earth, Christensen ended up creating a profoundly humanist work, a meditation on fear, on superstition, and on humanity's desperate, violent need to give a name and a face to that which it does not understand. It is a black mirror that reflects not so much the past as the persistence of our deepest-seated fears and the mechanisms, then as now, with which we try to exorcise them.