Häxan

e superstitious and the religious and quite successfully demonstrates the plethora of overlapping philosophies, manipulative strategies and just plain scaredy-catness of mankind's behaviour when faced with things unknown and unpredictable. The rudimentary augmentation of human bodies with wings, horns, hooves - all illustrated here using quite an entertaining mixture of what looks like ancient scripture, coupled with some silent film footage and plenty of plasticine shows it wasn't just the uneducated classes who bought into all of this mysticism. It's accompanied by some quite pithy and informative, discursive even, inter-titles that try to balance between the silly and the serious and some of the characterisations are genuinely quite thought-provoking, especially as the church was often a prime mover in causing and/or dealing with the consequences of these fevered and violent old wives' tales. I can't say I could make sense of all of it, but I think that might have been auteur Benjamin Christansen's point as he opens a Pandora's Box and let's us do the heavy sifting. One man's witch is another man's nun!