Sam: Hey!
Holly: What’s up?
Will: I didn’t think I was that drunk, I’m seeing double. And one of you’s a girl!
Sam: My hair has grown long during the quarantine, but I don’t think I could be mistaken for a girl just yet.
Will: It’s disturbing and it scares me.
Holly: I’m sorry. That’s just my face.
Will: Aaaggggh. Who’s that?
Holly: A shiny new addition to the blog.
Will: Sam, explain!
Sam: Explain girls? Well I’ll give it a go…
Will: I’m waiting…
Sam: SO this is Holly, my friend from Barcelona. She has insightful opinions on things.
Holly: I do?
Will: She sounds overqualified…
Sam: Actually, this film has a lot to say about women. Apparently it’s best not to trust them.
Will: Especially when they’re witches with old faces.
Holly: I came to review a film and eat peanut butter — let’s focus up.
Sam: You’re messing with our shtick. Who invited you?
Holly: You did.
Sam: Oh yeah, now I remember.
Holly: So now what happens?
Will: Well, now we find an awkward and shoe-horned segue to get us into the film.
Holly: Is this it?
Will: Oh yeah.
Sam: Alright Will, you chose it — what’s the film?
Will: It’s a 1922 Swedish docu-drama about medieval witches. It’s unlike anything else that exists… probably.
Sam: It’s also rather meta. It felt very ahead of its time.
Holly: IT. HAD. EVERYTHING. Nuns. Satan. Efficient stick-work.
Will: It started in the strangest way. The director addresses the audience while you’re shown, for about twenty minutes, a succession of olde pictures of witch stuff… which he prods at with a stick.
Holly: Efficiently.
Will: Yes, indeed.
Sam: It was dull, tedious, and totally worked at setting the mood.
Will: True, when you first start seeing the little drama scenes, you’re already prepared to see some weird mental shit.
Holly: The dog skeleton swinging from the ceiling made a strong first impression. After that I felt primed and ready to experience medieval Sweden through the eyes of the damned.
Sam: And after the educational part, we see numerous reenactments of torture, witch trials and Satan beckoning people through their bedroom windows.
Will: Yeah, so Satan was particularly memorable. He flicked his tongue around weirdly and had a hairy chest. And was played by the director, interestingly.
Sam: Maybe he struggled to cast the role because it was considered bad luck to play the devil on screen. Or maybe the director thought he had the best tongue for the job.
Holly: The tongue’s performance was intense yet nuanced. It reminded me of Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Will: Some of the scenes portraying witches parties/devil summonings were truly impressive as pieces of visual art. Albeit, intensely creepy visual art. When the film was released a critic wrote: ‘wonderful though this picture is, it is absolutely unfit for public exhibition’, which sums it up rather well I think!
Holly: Good thing we’re not the public.
Sam: There was something insidious about this movie that got under your skin. There is a whole subset of horror movies that are obsessed with convincing you that the footage is real. Blair Witch, Paranormal Activity, The Fourth Kind, Ghostwatch. Häxan doesn’t pretend the footage is real, quite the opposite, yet it was as effective, if not more than many other horror movies.
Holly: Around two thirds of the way through the film the director cuts to an interview with one of the main actors — a woman in her 80s — who claimed to have seen Satan and have a copy of a cursed prayer book. What’s fiction? What’s real? Who took my peanut butter?
Will: *guilty nomming noises*
Holly: Satan be on your head!
Will: There was something effective about the way that it showed how easy it was for women to be destroyed by nothing by rumour. The whole process was so irrational and easily twisted that there was no real way that a victim could defend themselves from the accusation. It was mob violence with God on their side.
Holly: So much has changed…
Sam: The film ends on an interesting moral note.
Will: It jumps ahead to modern day, and features a narrative of a woman suffering from ‘hysteria’, and then does its best to show how contemporary responses to mental health issues are basically the same as medieval witch mania. I wasn’t expecting it — but it gave the film some moral weight beyond just saying ‘HEY DUDES LOOK AT HOW CRAZY MEDIEVAL TIMES WERE’.
Holly: It was a nice twist, and you’re right it doesn’t quite get to the root of the issue. As a society, we’ve progressed from lobbing “witches” into rivers, to giving loud women cold showers. Not all problems can be solved by throwing water on them.
Sam: It worked in The Wizard of Oz.
Will: And Signs. Mel Gibson’s best film about aliens and cornfields.
Holly: I stand corrected.
Will: I think we need to mention the nuns…
Holly: I don’t know where to start. All it took was for one sister to be tempted by Hell, and the whole nun ecosystem descended into anarchy. And it was beautiful to watch: the screaming, the wild eyes, the leaping backwards into the font.
Will: NUNS GO WILD! WOOP WOOP.
Sam: There is something inherently watchable and captivating about silent movies. I’ve often dismissed the notion that cinema lost its purity with the invention of sound, since hearing the actors voices now seems like such an obvious development. But that silence draws you in, and allows your imagination to run freely. There’s a slowness in pacing and a reliance on framing and set design. I find it strangely captivating.
Will: I don’t think Häxan would have been so powerful if it had dialogue. Its visual focus seemed to bypass the verbal reasoning part of the brain, and gets into the subconscious far more effectively.
Holly: The silence prevents it from being a slapstick comedy, in many aspects. It handled religious themes in a way that could have easily been rendered too much of a parody for a modern audience to take seriously. It found a sweet spot between informing, entertaining, and provoking thought.
Will: Holly. That’s a damn fine point. Sam, I think you need to leave — this is the Will and Holly Film Adventure now!
Sam: Finally, I feel like Aladdin tricking Jafar into becoming a Genie. Later suckers!
Holly: Nooooooooooooooooooooooo!!! -shakes fist-
Will: This is fine. But tell us Sam, if you were staying, what would you want to watch next?
Sam: What do you know about baseball?
Will: GO LONG!
Sam: Yes, it’s best we watch a baseball movie ASAP. I’m thinking The Natural starring Robert Redford.
Will: TOUCHDOWN!
Holly: GOOOOOOAL!
Will: Alright, musketeers. This has been good. Sort of. Maybe. Bye!
Sam: Bye!
Holly: Hej då!
Films Referenced
Häxan (Benjamin Christensen, 1922)
The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939)
Ghostwatch (Lesley Manning, 1992)
The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sanchez, 1999)
Signs (M. Night Shyamalan, 2002)
Paranormal Activity (Oren Peli, 2007)
The Fourth Kind (Olatunde Osunsanmi, 2009)
The next film: The Natural (Barry Levinson, 1984)
