Häxan

Denmark | 1922 | 105 min. | Benjamin Christiansen

October 18, 2024

Grave robbing, torture, possessed nuns, and a satanic Sabbath: Benjamin Christensen’s legendary Häxan uses a series of dramatic vignettes to explore the scientific hypothesis that the witches of the Middle Ages suffered the same hysteria as turn-of-the-twentieth-century psychiatric patients. But the film itself is far from serious—instead, it’s a witches’ brew of the scary, gross, and darkly humorous.

The screening will be preceded by a lively conversation between SIFF Programmer Dan Doody and University of Washington Professor Amanda Doxtater. This screening is presented in partnership with the National Nordic Museum.

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Director: Benjamin Christiansen
Principal Cast: Maren Pedersen, Clara Pontoppidan, Elith Pio, Oscar Stribolt
Country: Denmark
Year: 1922
Running Time: 105 min.
Screenplay: Benjamin Christensen
Cinematographers: Johan Ankerstjerne
Editors: Elda Hansen

Dan Doody

About Dan Doody:

A Seattle-area native, Dan Doody received a degree in English from Western Washington University, and began working for the Seattle International Film Festival in 1999. He programs both features and short films for the festival, serving on the WTF! committee and as the festival's lead coordinator for its Oscar® qualifying ShortsFest section. He is an enthusiast of the gothic in both film and literature, the pagan-haunted pastorals found in English ghost stories, and the seedy streets of film noir. He could quite happily live in a crumbling castle so long as it was within walking distance of a neon-lit diner on a rain-slicked city boulevard.

About Amanda Doxtater:

Amanda Doxtater is Assistant Professor and Barbro Osher Endowed Chair of Swedish Studies in the Department of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Washington. Her book, Visions and Victims: Art Melodrama in the Films of Carl Th. Dreyer (2024) explores intersections between popular film melodrama and Scandinavian art-cinema. Writing widely on Nordic Cinema, her work engages with melodrama, gender, queer historiography, childhood and the family in the Nordic welfare state; and issues of class, race and ethnicity. Her publications include: “From Diversity to Precarity: Reading Childhood in Ruben Östlund’s Film Play (2011)” “Terror Melodrama, Race and the Nation: Ulaa Salim’s Sons of Denmark” and “History as Embodied Encounter: Queer Pleasures and Temporal Drag in Benjamin Christensen’s Witchcraft Through the Ages”. Together with Maxine Savage, she provided a commentary track on a Kino Lorber Blu-Ray edition of Carl Th. Dreyer’s classic of queer cinema, Michael (1924).