Haxan

"Here young maiden, take a potion of cat feces…" begins one of several black magic woman recipes for achieving one's desire (in this case seducing a monk) outlined in Benjamin Christensen's 1922 silent film Haxan. Actually, the aforementioned witches' brew is hardly the worst culinary fare on the table in this notable early hybrid of fact, folklore, and fiction that combines dramatic and documentary film techniques: the toads/unchristened children entrée sounded a wee bit grisly and the after dinner mint of kissing the devil's behind made halitosis seem preferable. Subtitled Witchcraft Through the Ages, this phantasmagoric compendium, loosely arranged into seven chronological chapters, offers up an unorthodox history of witches from medieval times to the (then) present day of 1921, when the medical basis of hysteria was just beginning to be understood. This tinted and restored version looks very handsome indeed on DVD for a film eighty years old, and the disc's extras include the shorter (and, in my opinion, inferior) 76-minute version narrated by William S. Burroughs; a new musical soundtrack performed by the Czech Film Orchestra, a commentary track, the director's introduction to the 1941 re-release, and more. Recommended for larger collections. (R. Pitman) [Blu-ray Review—Oct 22, 2019—Criterion, 105 min., not rated, Blu-ray: $39.99—Making its debut on Blu-ray, 1922’s Häxan features a great transfer with a DTS-HD 5.0 soundtrack. Extras include 2001 audio commentary by film scholar Casper Tybjerg, an abbreviated 'Witchcraft Through the Ages' 1968 version of the film (76 min.), a Bibliothèque diabolique photographic exploration of director Benjamin Christensen’s historical sources (15 min.), a 1941 introduction by Christensen (8 min.), outtakes (5 min.), notes on the score, and essays by critic Chris Fujiwara and scholar Chloé Germaine Buckley. Bottom line: this offbeat silent doc/drama hybrid looks sharp on Blu-ray.]