19. A Horror Film That Takes Place on a Non-American Holiday

Director and writer Benjamin Christensen did a study of Malleus Maleficarum, a 15th-century German guide for inquisitors also known as Hammer of Witches. He believed that the burning of witches was more about mental health and mass hysteria than witchcraft. While initially this ran into censorship issues in the U.S. due to its torture, nudity and sex, it was re-released in 1968 as Witchcraft Through the Ages with a new English-language narration by William S. Burroughs.

By the end, we’ve seen Satan lure women away from their husbands’ beds, murdering women by choking them and attacking monks and a woman claiming to give birth to children fathered by Satan, then being smeared with witch ointment, desecrating a cross, having dinner with demons and kissing Satan’s buttocks.

Actress Maren Pedersen told the director, “The devil is real. I have seen him sitting by my bedside.” Yet there’s no square-up reel here. Instead, if anything, sexual repression is the cause of many of the possessed moments.

A contemporary review said that Haxan had a “…satanic, perverted cruelty that blazes out of it, the cruelty we all know has stalked the ages like an evil shaggy beast, the chimera of mankind. But when it is captured, let it be locked up in a cell, either in a prison or a madhouse. Do not let it be presented with music by Wagner or Chopin to young men and women, who have entered the enchanted world of a movie theatre.”

Haxan has been used to show demons or the supernatural in many movies since it was made and it’s still powerful a century later.