Häxan

Watch how the Sabbath actually enters the film. It arrives through the mouth of a tortured old woman. The inquisitors show her the instruments, and she begins to describe the black mass, the flight, the demons, the kiss on the Devil's backside, and the film shows us her descriptions as if real. Christensen is precise about the mechanism: the demonic imagery is generated by the interrogation, poured into the accused and then read back out as evidence.

This is the actual theology of the medieval witch trial, which the film understands better than its scholarly frame lets on. The Devil in these vignettes is never independently met. He is always summoned by the accuser, the confessor, the manual of demonology that tells the torturer which questions to ask. The demon is a co-production of fear and pain. Christensen dramatizes the Sabbath in full so we cannot pretend it was harmless fantasy, then shows us its factory: a frightened woman and a man with an instrument, manufacturing hell.

Jung held that whatever a culture refuses to live is not destroyed but driven underground, where it festers into the shadow and eventually erupts. Medieval Christianity refused the body, sexuality, female power, and pagan ecstasy, and Häxan shows exactly where those exiled energies went. They gathered at the Sabbath. The black mass in the film is the photographic negative of the church: the same rituals inverted, the same reverence pointed at the opposite pole. That is precisely how the shadow appears, wearing the mirror-image of what consciousness worships.

The witch hunt is the psyche attacking its own disowned half. The pious accuse the ecstatic of exactly the desires the pious cannot admit to holding. Christensen's final move is the Jungian one. The shadow was never exorcised, only relocated. The energy the medieval world projected onto the witch, the modern world projects onto the hysteric and locks in a clinic. The material was never integrated. It was simply moved to a cleaner building and given a Latin name.