Cinema bizarro
By his satanic majesty’s request, two demonic oddities re-released on DVD
"We don’t burn old women today, but aren’t they wretched in a different way? And the hysterical woman with the strange behaviour – isn’t she still something of an enigma to us?" – William Burroughs, Witchcraft Through the Ages.
In the annals of film history there are few long lost works as mysterious, bizarre and altogether memorable as the recently restored and re-released Häxan (1922) and Incubus (1965). Sharing similar subject matter and a refusal to follow the rules of cinematic convention, the films have been rarely seen, but they carry long-standing reputations as cult classics. Now available on DVD, both films stand up as devilishly crafted pieces of horror, at turns expressionist and surreal, more than deserving of their notoriety.
On paper, Leslie Stevens’s directorial debut, Incubus, sounds like a bad joke. Starring William Shatner in his first big-screen role, Incubus was written and filmed entirely in the "universal" (see: "imaginary") language of Esperanto. Completed in the wake of Stevens’s sudden popularity, due to his Outer Limits television program, Incubus slipped through the cracks – too weird for mainstream consumption – and was believed lost for over 30 years. In 1999, a single print resurfaced in a French cinematheque, where it played in a regular late-night Rocky Horror Picture Show-style revue.
An incestuous offspring of The Seventh Seal and Rosemary’s Baby, Incubus concerns the attempts of succubus Kia (Allyson Ames) to seduce the gold-hearted Marc (Shatner), whom she eventually falls in love with. But when the Incubus (Milos Milos) is beckoned, Shatner’s seaside romance quickly blossoms into a full-on battle between the forces of good and evil.
The compositions of Stevens and cinematographer Conrad L. Hall (later responsible for Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid and American Beauty) come off as a striking tribute to Sven Nykvist’s most controlled and angular work for Ingmar Bergman. No matter how unusual it is to see a supernatural thriller in which the actors speak Esperanto, if the picture had never been exhumed, the greatest loss would have been Hall's astonishing visuals.
Whereas Incubus imagines its demons as spastic goats and beautiful blondes, Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan opts for the old-fashioned horns-and-spiked-tail variety. Intended as a documentary on the history of witchcraft and witch hunts throughout Europe, Häxan exists somewhere else between a truant Sunday school show-and-tell session and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
What begins as a slide show of historical etchings and artifacts of the black arts soon turns into a series of peculiarly disjointed dramatic recreations of historical reports. This is followed by a stream-of-consciousness narrative involving love potions, witch hunt hysteria and a batch of nuns gone loony under the gaze of Satan (portrayed by none other than the film’s director, his tongue permanently wagging about).
Adding to the strangeness of the proceedings, Christensen unexpectedly makes two asides concerning the production of the film. "One of my actresses insisted on trying the thumbscrew," he interjects, using a first-person title card, and then proceeds to show us just that – the actress smiles and laughs one moment, then screams in pain the next as the screws are tightened. Christensen winks. "I will not reveal the terrible confessions I forced from the young lady in less than a minute," says the next title card.
Later, Christensen takes another break from the action to cut to a close-up of a different actress portraying an elderly woman suspected of witchcraft. Christensen says that this actress told him "The devil is real. I have seen him sitting by my bedside." By constantly jumping the fence between supposed fact, fiction and self-reference, Häxan in many ways re-jigs our definition of what makes a film.
In 1967, the long strange history of Häxan became even stranger with a truncated edit and new narration supplied by William Burroughs. Retitled Witchcraft Through the Ages and set to a newly recorded jazz score, Burroughs opens the film with the pronouncement, "Silver arrow through the night! Silver arrow take thy flight! Silver arrow seek and find! Cursing heart and cursing mind!" The inclusion of both versions on Criterion’s impeccable DVD proves that, in any state, Häxan’s visual flair and unmatched imagination will always make for an unforgettable experience. |
