Screening Date: Wed. Oct. 28, 2026
Time: 7:30pm
Venue: Parkway Theater
Cost: $15 Adv. | $20 door
Run Time/Year/Country: 105min, 1922, Sweden & Denmark
Director: Benjamin Christensen

Grave robbing, torture, possessed nuns, and a satanic Sabbath: Benjamin Christensen’s legendary silent film uses a series of dramatic vignettes to explore the scientific hypothesis that the witches of the Middle Ages and early modern era suffered from the same ills as psychiatric patients diagnosed with hysteria in the film's own time. Based partly on Christensen’s own study of the Malleus Maleficarum, a 15th-century German guide for inquisitors, the film is a witches’ brew of the scary, the gross, and the darkly humorous. Praised for its combination of documentary-style and narrative storytelling, as well as its visual imagery, Häxan is considered Christensen's masterpiece, providing audiences with an experience unlike anything else in the history of cinema.

Paris 1919's music can be jaggedly buzzing and sinister, ethereal and serene, melancholy and stately. There is at times an almost science-fictional quality that seems to blend the mechanical with the organic. There are echoes of the industrial throb of Coil or Throbbing Gristle, Ennio Morricone's film score for The Thing, Enoesque ambience, the Red Room sequences in David Lynch's Twin Peaks, Pink Floyd's more cosmic psychedelia, silent-film innovator Georges Méliès, and more. Still, if a genre label is needed, Strouth's emphasis on digital manipulation and sometimes dark, unsettling atmospherics congenially resonates with both modern neo-classical and ambient drone music, even if it won't fit neatly into any one box.