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 it is still one of the strangest works in early cinema. Half documentary and half horror spectacle, it set out to explain the medieval witch-hunts as the product of ignorance and mental illness, not of the supernatural.

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

It was banned or censored in many countries on release for its nudity, blasphemy and graphic torture, and has since been taken up as a foundational document of horror, recirculating in 1968 in a version narrated by William S. Burroughs. Few films sit so oddly between lecture, exposé and waking nightmare, and fewer still from 1922 can disturb an audience the way this one does. It has been restored and widely revived in recent decades, and it is now a fixture of repertory programming, a touchstone for film-makers drawn to the uncanny, and a singular act of cinematic imagination.