Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922) — Free!

Arkadin Cinema & Bar is showing Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages on Friday, October 23, from 5 PM to 6:45 PM. It's a free screening of the 1922 silent horror documentary, and if you've never seen it, it's one of the strangest things to come out of the silent era.

Director Benjamin Christensen started the project in 1919 after coming across the Malleus Maleficarum, a 15th-century manual on the persecution of witches. He became convinced that witches still existed and set out to trace their history from medieval times to the present. He got funding from a Swedish production company on the guarantee of complete creative freedom, and he used it to assemble some of the best craftspeople and technicians of the day. It ended up being the most expensive Scandinavian film of its time.

Christensen didn't hold back on the imagery. He included amounts of nudity and gore that were unheard of in any other silent-era film: naked witches around a bonfire, a baby tossed into a stew pot, and Satan himself overseeing the chaos, played by Christensen. He paired those scenes with groundbreaking optical effects and stop-motion animation that still hold up. Because of that, the film was banned for decades, and it's since been reclaimed as a haunting, proto-feminist horror masterpiece.

The screening is at Arkadin Cinema & Bar, 5228 Gravois Ave. in St. Louis, and it's free. It runs from 5 PM to 6:45 PM on Friday, October 23.