Cinetopia Salon Halloween Special: Häxan (1922) + Live Score

Cinetopia Salon brings Häxan to the Institut Français d'Ecosse on Saturday 31 October, with an original live score performed by Jane Gardner and Hazel Morrison. It's a Halloween screening of Benjamin Christensen's 1922 silent film, also known as Witchcraft Through the Ages, one of early cinema's most eerie and unsettling masterworks.

Häxan is a strange beast of a film: part scholarly dissertation, part fever dream, and part horror spectacle. It starts as an illustrated lecture on medieval superstition and demonology before spiralling into lurid dramatisations of witchcraft, the Inquisition, and hysteria. By the end, it suggests that those condemned as witches may simply have been women suffering from misunderstood mental illness. The whole thing is curated by Callahan Fedullo.

The live score is performed by long-standing collaborators Jane Gardner and Hazel Morrison. Gardner is an Edinburgh-based pianist and composer who studied at York University and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland; Morrison is a percussionist and timpanist who trained at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. Together they'll be providing the piano and percussion/timpani accompaniment in real time.

Before the film, there's an apéritif hour with a drinks bar and complimentary nibbles, so you can settle in before the screening starts. Cinetopia Salon is supported by Film Hub Scotland, part of the BFI's Film Audience Network, and funded by Screen Scotland and BFI National Lottery funding. Tickets are £15 full price and £12 for French Institute members, with the screening starting at 18:00 at the Institut Français d'Ecosse, West Parliament Square, Edinburgh Old Town EH1 1RF.