You could be forgiven for thinking Häxan esoteric. The film opens with a prosaic slideshow of diabolical images, evenly pitched between Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and the Malleus Maleficarum. Yet director Benjamin Christensen exhumes some surprisingly modern touches from this primitivism. Not least of these is the film’s ambitious four-act structure, which transports the viewer from interminable vignettes of monastic intrigue to the present day. Quite fitting for a film about the devil’s own, the shock value endures; Häxan admirably holds its own against The Exorcist’s potpourri of spider-walks, pea-soup vomit and strategically deployed crucifixes. So, expect infants being hurled into steaming cauldrons, demon births with befeathered monstrosities, and (by far the worst for springing from fact) the medieval church inflicting tortures on a harmless old woman. The devil’s appearance in the monastery is one of the earliest jump scares in cinema – and plays out, quite naturally, in total silence...

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