Häxan

And it only ever had one performance in Brisbane at the Institute of Contemporary Arts.

And I'd been in touch with Madeline before for another project and sort of reached out to her and said, what if we were to do Haxan for Halloween? Would you be interested in coming and redoing the score that you did in Brisbane? And you can listen to that score on Bandcamp.

She released it as an album and it's a terrific record.

And she loved the idea, of course.

just, I

love these events.

And particularly when you have something like, you know, whether it's Edwin's score for Nosferatu or Madeleine's for Haxan, where it's a contemporary score.

And so you have this lovely kind of handshake across the ages where you've got a film that's 100 years old, but with a sound that's very contemporary.

... all about this 100-year-old silent horror film.

It's a, a film from Denmark called Häxan, made in 1922, and I'd come across Häxan relatively recently.

And if you're interested in, in film and a lover of physical media, there's a great label in the UK called Radiance, and Häxan was actually a title that, uh, I saw had been released through Radiance.

And when I, uh, got ahold of that and realized there's about three different versions of the film on there, you know, o- over the course of about ov- over 100 years it's been sort of re-edited in some cases.

There's, like, a 1968 version that has this great narration from William Burroughs, which is terrific.

There's, like, a jazz score and a different score.

So straightaway I was sort of looking at that thinking, "Oh, here's a great horror title, a great silent title that actually has already had a number of different treatments." And then I kind of remembered that, um, in, a couple of years ago there was a, a Australian composer called Madeline Kokolis who had written a score for this and pr- and presented it in Brisbane, and it only ever had one, you know, performance in Brisbane at the Institute of Contemporary Arts.

And I'd been in touch with Madeline before for another project, and so I reached out to her and said, "What if we were to do Häxan for Halloween? Would you be interested in coming and doing, redoing the score that you did in Brisbane?" And you can listen to that score on Bandcamp.

What's how movies, Leanne, watching? It's like, oh, there's some weird fucking witches in this shit.

What are you watching, Haxan?

Well, Hokum maybe.

What's the movie? Hokum?

Ha- Haxan.

Haxan, man.

Haxan, it's one of April's favorite movies.

Boy, she'll tell you all about Haxan.

It was like a five person band doing orchestrations, original compositions they did for silent films.

They did one for the original Nosferatu, which I had not get to go see, but they also movie called Hexen, which is the 1922 Swedish film.

But in Swedish, Hexen in English means the witch.

so so i was like watching it and i was like huh because i knew it was i didn't do a witchcraft or whatever but i was like oh wait no it's called the witch okay this is a good prep for what i'm doing later this week yeah and it's basically it's an odd film it's a very it's an interesting movie it it's it came out in 1922 the director benjamin christiansen uh had like gotten fascinated with witchcraft he like read a book about it uh and he spent like two years just like studying witchcraft in like 1919 and he was like okay i'm gonna make a movie about this and so it's actually like a almost like a feature-length essay on witchcraft and almost like a documentary with like dramatizations of it nightmarish type images in some parts of it.

Like at

But it was a great experience watching it.

Great visuals.

Hexen, if you guys haven't seen it, check it out.

Today we're going to talk about what happened the moment through four films that helped build horror as we know it.

We're going to talk about Hexen, Nosferatu, The Phantom of the Opera, and finally Vampyr.

A movie standing in that strange doorway between the silent nightmare and the talking picture.

These aren't just old horror movies, they're pieces of horror's DNA.

and some of them almost didn't survive long enough for us to actually see them.

So let's start with possibly the strangest movie I've ever seen in general, and definitely of the four, Benjamin Christensen's 1922 Haxan, meaning The Witch.

Calling Haxan a horror movie doesn't completely explain it.

Calling it a documentary doesn't work either.

Vampyr.

Um, uh, uh, Haxan.

Haxan is, like, one of the first horror movies.

Shit.

Fucking crazy wa-

I think it's even a commentary on AI as well, because the protagonist ends up creating this thing that he thinks he wants, and you have this thing about the... possessed for want of a better word version of Nikki says things and then gets things wrong so it's things like she talks about her dead cat and he's like what are you talking about it's my dead cat and she's like oh yeah you're right if you've ever spent any time speaking to a large language model where it gets something wrong and you say no no that's not right and they'll be like of course that's not right yes this is what's right there's a lot of that I think it's actually dialing into a lot of issues that young people will relate to and that's part of why it did so well because it's almost this was made for you and I do connect it to back rooms in that way in the sense of This is actually on the pulse of what young people are thinking about, whereas so many things aren't.

Which certainly makes sense, given how young the guys who made both those movies actually are.

Yeah, and did you know that it was made for less than a million dollars? I don't believe I did.

That's actually even more

It started before the Avengers came out.

They got a voice actor that sounds kind of like Robert Downey Jr. to play Tony Stark, and he has Jarvis the AI, and there's other similarities that you can see.

What I really like about it in comparison to the MCU movies, each episode is a different villain and a different setting and a different story, and they're just playing with the whole world.

Whereas each movie is a very finely detailed look at one small corner of it.

Um, oh, we can't not mention The Goose Woman.

That has been mentioned on the podcast before.

That's a cracker.

I don't know if you've heard.

Uh, that was one of Mel Self's favorite all-time HippFest performances-

Ah

... mentioned in an earlier episode.

With the wonderful Sue Lee on saw and cello.