Häxan (1922)

Benjamin Christensen, Benjamin Christensen, Maren Pedersen, Clara Pontoppidan · 1922 · 105 min

Benjamin Christensen spent two years and more money than any Scandinavian film had yet cost on a documentary lecture about witchcraft that keeps erupting into full dramatised horror — sabbaths, torture chambers, a devil played by the director himself. Its argument, that the accused were ill or old or merely inconvenient, is delivered with real anger. Banned or cut almost everywhere for decades. Nothing else from 1922 looks remotely like it.

Chosen print (2026-08-23): Archive.org item haxan-pnm — 1456x1080 @ 14.8 Mbps, 11.74 GB, 105.8 min.

Selected by a catalogue-wide print sweep, which scores candidates on resolution and bits per pixel and rejects broadcast captures, AI upscales, colorised and frame-interpolated copies, wrong cuts, and frames whose shape the film never had. The downloaded file was verified byte-for-byte against Archive.org's published size and MD5, and the torrent was generated from that exact file.

Silent-era runtimes are advisory — projection speed was never standardised, so the same print runs materially longer or shorter depending on the transfer's frame rate. Runtime was weighed accordingly rather than used as a hard filter.

Watched end to end (2026-08-25). The bytes prove we fetched the file the report names; the watch confirmed it is the right print.

Public domain in the United States by expiry of the full copyright term — and the URAA question that flagged this page dissolves on the same math: even where the URAA restored a foreign work's US copyright, the restored term is 95 years from publication, and for a 1922 publication that term ended with 2017. The original film is PD in the US whether or not it was ever restored. (Verify-first flag cleared by owner decision, 2026-08-17.)

What the flag was guarding is enforced at print selection instead, as hard exclusions: the 1968 Witchcraft Through the Ages — Antony Balch's 76-minute re-edit with William S. Burroughs narration and Daniel Humair's jazz score — is a separate derivative work on its own clock and circulates widely mislabeled as "Häxan"; it and its elements never ship. Modern restorations (Svensk Filminstitutet) and every modern score are likewise off-limits. Fast tell: the original runs ~105 minutes, the Balch edit 76. The chosen print's score is cleared separately, as with every silent.