Its superb audio track features a new score recreated from the original list of musical cues. Criterion offers a strikingly beautiful print of the fully restored and re-tinted Häxan and again pairs it with the Burroughs version. Now this infamous curio is finally available on DVD under the Criterion Collection folio. Few versions of either incarnation have been released on home video, but restorations have appeared on VHS through Great Britain's Redemption label and, in 1999, Home Vision Entertainment's pairing of the Swedish Film Institute's restored Häxan and (unrestored) Witchcraft Through the Ages. That edit sports the add-on Burroughs' narration and an anarchic musical score featuring Jean-Luc Ponty. "hexen," meaning "witches") was long available only in rare, diminished forms, the most well known being a 1968 re-edit given the title Witchcraft Through the Ages. "The Naked Lunch" Burroughs, complete with acid jazz soundtrack? Is it true that it displays witches cavorting naked with lusty devils? Is a baby really drained of blood before it's tossed into a stew pot? What's this about women lining up to kiss Satan's bulbous ass? Inquisitional torture? Flying on broomsticks? Hysterical nuns? Sacrilege and perversion? Demonic orgies? Otherworldly monstrosities emerging from between an old crone's legs? And it's a documentary? And is there really a version narrated by Beat generation writer and hipster icon William S. Officially banned outside of Sweden for decades due to graphic imagery and an unabashed anti-clerical theme, Häxan has grown into a cinema legend one hears about but rarely, if ever, gets a chance to actually see. Mabuse presented their stories as fiction, filmmaker Benjamin Christensen's Häxan appeared in the guise of a documentary, its very realism at the heart of its hypnotic allure and its scandalous notoriety.
Mabuse took a near-supernatural journey to Berlin's criminal underworld, a film opened in Sweden that was to become notorious for its bold depictions of torture, madness, carnality, and most memorably horrific acts performed by and for bestial, nightmarish demons, including Satan himself.
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What was it about 1922? In the same year Nosferatu showed the world how to make a vampire movie and Dr. Oscar Stribolt, Clara Pontoppidan, Else Vermehren,Īlice O'Fredericks, Johannes Andersen, and Ib Schønberg Written and directed by Benjamin Christensen Maren Pedersen, Benjamin Christensen, Ella La Cour,Įmmy Schonfeld, Kate Fabian, Benjamin Christensen, Häxan / Witchcraft Through the Ages: The Criterion Collection Home Vision Entertainment Starring Elisabeth Christensen, Astrid Holm, Karen Winther, The DVD Journal: Häxan / Witchcraft Through the Ages: The Criterion Collection
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