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This Halloween, experience one of early cinema’s most gloriously eerie and unsettling masterworks accompanied by an original live score from two exceptional Edinburgh-based musician/composers.Danish filmmaker Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan (Witches, 1922) – also known as Witchcraft Through the Ages is unlike anything else in the silent film canon: part scholarly dissertation, part fever dream, part full-blooded horror spectacle.
Beginning as an illustrated lecture on medieval superstition and demonology, the film spirals into a series of increasingly lurid dramatisations of witchcraft, inquisition and hysteria, before arriving, with startling modernity, at the suggestion that those condemned as witches may simply have been women suffering from misunderstood mental illness.
Shot in meticulous, sometimes scandalous detail, Häxan remains genuinely strange and disturbing a century on. Satan leers. The torture chambers unsettle. The nuns misbehave. It is, by turns, a work of serious inquiry and delirious provocation, and one of the most visually inventive films ever made.
Cinetopia Salon is supported by Film Hub Scotland, part of the BFI’s Film Audience Network, and funded by Screen Scotland and National Lottery funding from the BFI.
Evening Schedule
6pm - Apéro hour in the Salon
7pm - Introduction to the film by guest curator Callahan Fedullo
7.15pm - Film screening with live score
9pm - Conversations continue back in the Salon where the bar will remain open until 10 pm
Please note: drinks can be purchased at our pop-up bar (cash or card), but are not included in the ticket price and are only allowed in the Salon space before and after the film. Please do Not take drinks into the cinema auditorium. Complementary nibbles available on a first-come basis from 6pm.
Age: 15+
Price: £15 Full Price | £12 for French Institute members
Content Advisories: Moderate torture, mild sexual and occult nudity, and disturbing or intense thematic imagery depicting historical Inquisition practices
More information: Doors open 15 minutes before the screening
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Event venue
West Parliament Square, EH1 1 Edinburgh, United Kingdom, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Tickets
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