Haxan - Film and Live Score

“Haxan was way ahead of its time when it was made”, says musician Geoff Smith, who is touring the south of England performing a self-penned score to the Swedish ‘documentary’ about witchcraft, made in 1922 by director Benjamin Christiansen. “And I would go as far as to say that it would still be ahead of its time if it were made today”. The film is a silent classic, a massive influence on subsequent horror films, which purports to be a documentary about the persecution of witches in the Middle Ages, but which drifts off into fanciful narrative tangents in which a baby is drained of blood and tossed into a stew-pot, naked witches cavort with devils, a hag makes a potion using a severed finger, and women line up to kiss Satan’s arse. “It’s hardcore stuff”, says Smith. “It’s not the sort of thing you’d take your kids to”. The film was banned from every European country bar Sweden on its release, became a firm favourite of the Surrealists, and was adopted by the hippy generation after being released with a talk-over by William S Burroughs.

This rare chance to see a silent classic on the big screen is augmented by the fact that Smith will be performing a live score on an instrument he’s invented himself, a type of hammered dulcimer which can reproduce various Eastern tonal systems as well as the standard Western one. “This gives me a much wider palette of colours to play with”, says the musician, a world-leading virtuoso in his field. Unmissable. DL