Häxan

Made in 1922 by the Danish director Benjamin Christensen and financed by Sweden's Svensk Filmindustri, Häxan was one of the most expensive Scandinavian films of the silent era, and remains one of the strangest works in all of early cinema. Part documentary, part horror spectacle, it set out to explain medieval witch-hunts as the product of ignorance and mental illness rather than the supernatural.

Christensen, who also plays the Devil, moves from scholarly illustrations and a pointer tapping at woodcuts into elaborate dramatised sequences — covens, tortures, processions of the damned — staged with a tactile, candle-lit grotesquerie that still unsettles. The imagery anticipates decades of horror cinema, while the film's closing argument, linking the persecuted witch to the diagnosed hysteric, gives it a startling modern bite.

Banned and censored in many countries on release for its nudity, blasphemy and graphic torture, it has since been embraced as a landmark, later recirculating in a 1968 version narrated by William S. Burroughs. Few films sit so oddly across categories — lecture, exposé and waking nightmare at once — and fewer still from 1922 retain such power to disturb. It endures as a foundational document of horror and a singular act of cinematic imagination. Restored and widely revived in recent decades, it is now a fixture of repertory programming and a touchstone for film-makers drawn to the uncanny.