So this is a movie about witches (“Haxan” is, give or take some umlauts, Danish for “witch,” apparently) from 1922.

It was on my to-watch list largely because of that “1922” part. I’ve been watching this “Story of Film” thing that’s a kind of hyper-opinionated film history, and it talked about this as one of the first feature-length movies of note, and it sounded interesting enough to seek out.

But so it’s not exactly what I expected. What I thought it would be is a kind of horror movie about witches. What it actually is, is a history lecture about witches. It’s divided into seven parts; two of them are straight-up just like looking at medieval illustrations interspersed with narration, even down to using a pointer to point out particular features of a woodcut or whatever. It starts with one of these, and for fifteen minutes, it wasn’t even clear if there was ever going to be a traditional movie in here, or if it was just a fancy filmstrip.

But then it did get to the movie part, and it’s basically just illustrating fictitious medieval witches, and then a fictitious witch trial, which is getting across the points that most witches weren’t really witches, and that witchcraft accusations would sweep communities and lead to whole waves of counter-accusations etc. Okay, cool.

Probably the most interesting part was the last one, where they go to the “modern” world of 1922, and talk about how today, old people aren’t so poor and neglected, so don’t need to be cast out as witches; and about how many of the things that were symptoms of witchery in women back then are now Scientifically Recognized(tm) as “hysteria” instead, and it’s like, okay, people of Jazz Age Denmark, in a hundred years or so, this isn’t going to sound as modern and progressive as you think it does right now.

At any rate, this is a movie that had some interesting stuff in it — their demons are genuinely creepy, the witch trial plot is familiar but reasonably well-done — and it held my attention for the full time, mostly just because I never had any idea what was going to be coming next, as it’s so off-axis from what a modern conception of a movie is. But fundamentally, it’d be difficult to recommend this for the entertainment value alone, and it’s probably mostly worth watching if you want some perspective on film history and how people of the 1920s thought about witches and “hysteria.”