WEBVTT
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There is a witch you already know.
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You've seen her before.
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Perhaps she's hunched over a cauldron.
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Perhaps she has a hooked nose, wrinkled skin, and a wart somewhere prominently visible.
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Maybe there's an animal beside her.
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Maybe she lives alone.
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Perhaps she's old and ugly.
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Perhaps she's young and beautiful.
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Although if she is, there's a reasonable chance the film will eventually reveal that she was old and ugly all along.
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She might seduce men, steal children, curse babies, poison crops, fly through the night, gather secretly with other women.
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She might even have something unusual on her body.
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A mole, a scar, a birthmark.
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Something that tells us that beneath the ordinary exterior, there is something else.
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Something unnatural.
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Something wicked.
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You know this woman.
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Even if you've never believed in witchcraft for a single second, you know what you're supposed to look for.
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Which is rather strange, because nobody's ever actually met her.
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She was assembled, piece by piece, fear by fear, story by story, until eventually somebody tried to write the instructions down.
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And centuries before filmmakers could simply point a camera at a woman and make an audience recognize a witch.
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Authorities were already trying to work out how to identify one.
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Today's hidden hex isn't hidden inside a spell.
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It's hidden somewhere much more disturbing on the witch herself.
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And once you know what you're looking for, you start seeing its fingerprints everywhere.
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Hello and welcome to Hexposition, the podcast where we put witches on screen under the microscope and uncover the history, folklore, and cultural baggage hiding beneath the pointy hats.
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I'm Millie Hardy Ashton, and this is a Familiar Footsteps production.
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Last time we went all the way back to one of Western culture's earliest and most enduring magical women, Cersei.
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Goddess, enchantress, monster, victim, temptress, feminist icon, depending entirely upon who is telling the story.
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But Cersei belongs to a world where magic is simply part of the landscape.
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Gods interfere with mortals, prophecies are real, people transform into animals.
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Magic does not automatically make somebody evil.
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Eventually, Western culture begins doing something rather different.
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It stops asking, what can a magical woman do?
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And starts asking, what kind of woman must a witch be?
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That distinction matters enormously.
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Because the witch we recognize from film and television didn't spring fully formed from folklore.
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She was constructed over centuries.
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Religion, politics, misogyny, superstition, art, literature, demonology, witch hunting, and eventually cinema.
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So today we're going to do something slightly dangerous.
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We're going to build a witch.
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Not literally, I don't have the insurance.
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We're going to take apart the cultural witch and work out where some of her most enduring characteristics came from.
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And our main guide today is one of the strangest, most unsettling, and most important early films about witchcraft ever made.
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Benjamin Christensen's 1922 film Haxon.
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Part documentary, part horror, part historical reconstruction, part lecture, and completely bonkers.
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We'll also encounter Witch Hammer, The Crucible, and briefly Robert Egger's The Witch, because together they reveal something fascinating.
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The screen witch didn't begin with cinema.
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Filmmakers inherited a character European culture had already spent centuries designing.
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Welcome to episode three.
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The Hammer of Witches.
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Before the Witch Had a Uniform.
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If I ask you to picture a witch, chances are your brain supplies a surprisingly specific image.
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Black clothes, pointed hat, broomstick, cauldron, cat, maybe warts, possibly green skin if the Wizard of Oz got to you early enough.
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But historically there was no single witch uniform.
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There couldn't be.
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Beliefs surrounding magic existed across cultures long before the European witch trials.
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But those pe but those beliefs weren't necessarily describing the same person, practice, or even concept.
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There were healers, diviners, cunning folk, herbalists, people who made charms, people who claimed to find lost objects, people accused of curses, people believed to communicate with spirits, and people who practiced forms of folk magic while simultaneously considering themselves perfectly good Christians.
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Our modern categories don't always work when we try to force them backwards onto historical people.
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And magic itself wasn't necessarily divided neatly into witchcraft equals evil and religion equals good.
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That binary had to develop.
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Over the medieval period, Christian theologians increasingly connected ideas about harmful magic with heresy and ultimately with the Christian devil.
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And that produces an important transformation.
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The dangerous magical practitioner isn't simply somebody who can harm you anymore.
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The witch becomes somebody whose magic represents allegiance to an enemy of God.
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That changes everything.
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Because witchcraft is no longer merely something you do, it can become something authorities believe you are.
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And gradually, theologians and demonologists construct an extraordinary mythology around that identity.
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Witches supposedly make pacts with the devil.
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They supposedly gather secretly, they supposedly fly through night.
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They supposedly have sexual relationships with demons, attack fertility, harm children, renounce Christianity.
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And if you're currently thinking, hang on, that sounds suspiciously like a horror film, exactly.
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But these ideas don't all appear at once.
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And that's really important.
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There wasn't a meeting where everyone sat down and agreed upon the official witch cinematic universe.
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The witch we recognize today is more like a collage.
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Different periods keep sticking things onto her.
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Folklore contributes something, theology contributes something, demonology contributes something, witch trials, artists, writers, eventually filmmakers inherit the entire scrapbook.
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And one particular 15th century writer would become notorious for trying to organize some of those ideas into something systematic.
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His name was Heinrich Kramer.
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But we'll come back to him because before we meet the man who tried to explain witches, I want to show you what happened when cinema tried to show us one.
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In 1922, Danish filmmaker Benjamin Christensen released Hackson.
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The title simply means The Witch.
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And if you've ever watched Hackson, it is genuinely difficult to describe.
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It's a silent film, but it isn't quite a conventional narrative film.
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It's partly an illustrated history of witchcraft, partly dramatized reconstruction, partly horror, and partly social commentary.
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Christensen appears himself.
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There are models, diagrams, historical illustrations, demons, nuns, witches, torture, and a spectacularly unpleasant devil played, incidentally, by Christensen himself.
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Essentially, imagine somebody from 1922 giving you a lecture about witchcraft.
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Except occasionally the PowerPoint comes alive and Satan starts sticking his tongue out at people.
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And I mean this as an enormous compliment, because Huxon does something extraordinarily important for the history of the screen witch.
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Christensen researched historical witchcraft literature and imagery, including the notorious Mallius Malificarum, and he takes imagery that had existed in manuscripts, woodcuts, theological writing, paintings, and folklore, and gives it movement.
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We see witches brewing, women flying.
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We see the witch's Sabbath, we see demons, we see grotesque bodies, we see supposed supernatural practices.
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The imagined witch steps off the historical page and on to the cinema screen.
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And look at the body cinema gives her.
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Aging, grotesque, sexualized, other.
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It's a body that reflects centuries of cultural suspicion.
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But here's what makes Huxon much more interesting than simply an early horror film.
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Christensen doesn't merely reproduce witch hunting fantasies as fact.
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He also turns the camera towards the people making the accusations.
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We see interrogation, we see coercion, we see torture, we see suggestion producing increasingly elaborate confessions.
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One accusation produces another and another and another.
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Suddenly the horror isn't simply what if witches exist.
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It's what happens when everybody becomes convinced that they do.
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And that's why Hackson is such an important film for Hex position.
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Because almost as soon as cinema begins substantially visualizing the traditional European witch, cinema also begins questioning who constructed her.
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And nearly 50 years later, another European film pushes that question even further.
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You'll have to forgive my pronunciation here, I don't speak Czech.
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Witch Hammer.
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In 1970, Czech director Ottaka Wavra released a film that translates to Witch Hammer.
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And by this time, there's very little spectacular magic.
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No green faces, no sparkling spells, no broomstick chases, because Witch Hammer understands something much more frightening.
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Magic doesn't have to be real.
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The accusation is enough.
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The film dramatizes 17th century witch trials in Moravia.
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Suspicion becomes interrogation.
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Interrogation becomes torture.
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Torture becomes confession.
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Somebody gives a name, that person is arrested.
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Pain produces another confession, another confession produces another name, and the machinery keeps moving.
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The witch isn't discovered, the witch is manufactured, which makes witch hammer almost the perfect companion to Hackson.
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Hackson shows us the mythology, witch hammer shows us what happens when institutions believe it.
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And because Vavra's film was produced in communist Czechoslovakia, witch persecution also becomes a political language.
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Authoritarianism, surveillance, forced confession, ideological conformity, the terrifying power of an institution that has already decided what the truth must be.
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And eventually, of course, the phrase witch hunt doesn't require witches at all.
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Which brings us to perhaps the most familiar screen version of that idea.
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The Crucible.
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Nicholas Heipner's 1996 adaptation of Arthur Miller's The Crucible stars Daniel Day Lewis as John Proctor, Winona Ryder as Abigail Williams, and Joan Allen as Elizabeth Proctor.
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And although Miller's play takes enormous dramatic liberties with the historical Salem witch trials, the mechanism should now sound very familiar.
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The invisible crime has supposedly occurred.
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The authorities accept that the crime is possible.
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Accusations become evidence, confessions are rewarded, denials become suspicious, and suddenly innocence is almost impossible to prove.
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That's the trap at the centre of witch hunting.
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If you confess, you're a witch.
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If you refuse to confess, your refusal can itself be a confession.
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And if the crime you're accused of committing is supernatural, what physical evidence could possibly prove you didn't do it?
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Unless, of course, people start looking for evidence on you.
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Keep that thought, because it's going to matter.
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The Mallius Maleficarum caused the European witch trials.
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Fact, fiction, or folklore?
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The answer is mostly fiction, with one enormous factual footnote.
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The Malleus Maleficarum, usually translated as the Hammer of Witches, was written by the Dominican Inquisitor Heinrich Kramer and first published in the late 15th century, and it became notorious.
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But Kramer did not invent the witch.
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He didn't invent witch hunting, and Europe did not simply receive the Malleus, read it, and collectively start burning women.
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Witch persecutions varied enormously.
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Different regions, different legal systems, different periods, different religious authorities, and different local circumstances.
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Some places prosecuted enormous numbers of people, and others prosecuted comparatively few.
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And the Malleus was never universally accepted as the European witch hunting law book.
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But here's the factual footnote.
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The book was influential.
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It circulated through print, it gathered existing beliefs about witchcraft and demonology together.
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It presented them with the appearance of systematic authority.
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And crucially for us, it was profoundly misogynistic.
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Cramer, Kramer, however you want to pronounce it, argued that women were particularly susceptible to witchcraft, weaker in faith, more impressionable, more carnal?
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Female sexuality becomes dangerous, female behavior becomes suspicious, female bodies become vulnerable to interpretation.
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So did Heinrich Kramer invent witchcraft?
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Fiction.
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Did the Malleus single-handedly cause the European witch trials?
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Fiction.
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Did texts, like the Malleus Malificarum, help codify and decimate an increasingly elaborate idea of what a witch supposedly was?
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Fact.
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And that distinction matters because Kramer wasn't creating a monster from nothing.
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He was helping to give an existing cultural monster a description, which brings us back to that mole from the beginning.
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A mole, a scar, a birthmark, something unusual, something that told everybody else what she really was.
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And here is today's hidden hex.
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The witch's body became evidence.
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Heinrich Kramer was deeply interested in the supposed physical and sexual reality of witchcraft.
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His obsession with women and sexuality had already caused problems during his attempted prosecutions at Innsbruck in 1485.
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And after that failure, he produced the Malleus Maleficarum.
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But we need an important historical distinction here.
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Kramer did not personally invent every bodily test later associated with witch hunting.
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Over the following centuries, demonology and witch hunting culture developed increasingly elaborate ideas about identifying witches physically.
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One was the devil's mark.
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The idea that the devil might mark somebody who had entered into a pact with him.
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And then there's the so-called witch's teeth, supposedly an abnormal part of the body from which a familiar spirit might feed.
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And when people went looking for these things, ordinary bodies became evidence.
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A mole, a birthmark, a scar, a skin tag, an unusually shaped nipple.
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Something that didn't respond to pain in the way an examiner expected.
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And if you already decided the person in front of you might be the witch, almost anything unusual can become proof.
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And I'm laughing because it's laughable.
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This produces a horrifying logical problem.
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Once the body itself can betray you, how do you prove that you're not a witch?
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And that idea has never really left screen horror.
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The theology changes, the storytelling device doesn't.
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How often does film tell us that supernatural evil leaves a mark?
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A symbol appears on the skin, eyes change colour, a scar reveals someone's identity, a body transforms.
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Something apparently ordinary becomes physically other.
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We still expect supernatural identity to become visible, and suddenly Hackson becomes even more interesting because cinema can do something the demonologist's book can't.
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It can show us the imagined witch.
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A grotesque old woman, a flying witch, a sexual woman associated with demons, a strange body, a threatening body, a body that tells the audience this woman is different.
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And once cinema learns how to do that, it doesn't have to explain the history.
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The audience simply learns the shorthand.
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Which brings us to a much more recent film, The Witch.
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Jump forward almost a century from Hackson to Robert Eggers' 2015 film The Witch, starring Anya Taylor Joy as Thomasin.
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Eggers deliberately builds the film around the language, religious worldview, and supernatural fears of 17th century New England.
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And the witch who emerges from that world isn't a representation of what modern practising witches actually do.
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She's something much more relevant to the episode.
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She's the witch Puritan society feared.
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She harms children, she threatens the family, she uses children's bodies in magic.
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She seduces, she flies, she gathers with other witches, and she is explicitly connected to the devil.
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And then there's Black Philip, a goat, a familiar-looking animal association, a satanic presence, and one of modern horror's most memorable invitations to live deliciously.
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What makes the witch so fascinating is that nearly 500 years after Kramer, a filmmaker can reach back into the imagined world of early modern witchcraft, and audiences still recognize the monster.
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That's the legacy we're tracing, not an unbroken line from one book to one film trope, something much messier.
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Demonology, folklore, trial narratives, art, literature, theatre, cinema, television.
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Each generation inherits the witch and adds something else onto her.
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So, what does any of this have to do with the witch we recognize today?
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Almost everything.
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Because cinema didn't invent the visual language of witchcraft, it inherited one.
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Before filmmakers ever needed an audience to recognise a witch, European culture had spent centuries attempting to identify her.
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What does she do?
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Who does she meet?
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Where does she go?
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What does she believe?
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What does she do to children?
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What does she do to men?
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What does she do with her own body?
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What does her body look like?
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And that last question is particularly powerful for cinema, because film is visual.
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The quickest way to tell an audience somebody is different is to make them look different.
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And that is exactly what happens to the screen witch.
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Her age can mark her, her sexuality can mark her, her behavior can mark her, her body can mark her, and eventually her clothes can mark her.
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And none of these screen conventions have one neat origin.
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That's the point.
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The witch is a cultural collage.
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Take the witch's mark.
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Modern supernatural stories still repeatedly give magical or cursed characters bodily signs of what they are.
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The historical belief largely disappeared.
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The storytelling language survives.
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Take the old witch.
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Aging female bodies become associated with ugliness, decay, and supernatural danger.
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Cinema inherits the hag and makes her instantly recognizable.
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Take the seductive witch.
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Centuries of anxiety surrounding female sexuality become enchantment, glamour, and dangerous beauty.
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Take children.
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Historical accusations repeatedly connect witchcraft with fertility, infant mortality, and harm to children.
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And fictional witches continue stealing them, eating them, cursing them, and taking their youth.
00:22:00.079 --> 00:22:01.599
Take the secret gathering.
00:22:01.839 --> 00:22:07.680
Historical fantasies about the witch's Sabbath eventually contribute to our understanding of the coven.
00:22:08.319 --> 00:22:12.640
Later films and television will do fascinating things with that idea.
00:22:13.039 --> 00:22:21.680
Sometimes they'll make the gathering frightening, sometimes they'll reclaim it, and sometimes they'll turn it into friendship, sisterhood, or chosen family.
00:22:22.000 --> 00:22:25.359
But those are stories for later in this season.
00:22:25.680 --> 00:22:32.160
For now, the important thing is cinema inherits a witch who is already supposed to be recognizable.
00:22:32.480 --> 00:22:36.960
That's what makes Hackson such an extraordinary hero text for this episode.
00:22:37.279 --> 00:22:45.279
Christensen is standing remarkably close to the moment when centuries of static witch imagery become moving screen language.
00:22:45.519 --> 00:22:56.319
The demonologist describes her, the artist draws her, the storyteller repeats her, the filmmaker gives her a body, and the audience learns to recognize her.
00:22:56.559 --> 00:23:02.079
Then Witch Hammer shows us what happens when the institution decides that imagined witch is real.
00:23:02.480 --> 00:23:09.599
The crucible gives modern audiences one of the most recognizable stories about what happens when accusation becomes evidenced.
00:23:09.920 --> 00:23:16.799
And the witch demonstrates that filmmakers can still reach back into that historical nightmare and make it terrifying today.
00:23:17.039 --> 00:23:19.680
The witch hunters didn't discover the witch.
00:23:19.920 --> 00:23:23.440
Heinrich Kramer didn't single-handedly invent her.
00:23:23.680 --> 00:23:33.680
Benjamin Christensen didn't invent the screen witch, but somewhere between the demonologist's page and the filmmaker's camera, the imaginary witch acquired a body.
00:23:33.920 --> 00:23:40.640
And once audiences could recognize that body, filmmakers no longer needed to tell us she was a witch.
00:23:40.880 --> 00:23:42.960
They could simply show us.
00:23:56.880 --> 00:23:59.279
Mix in religious anxiety.
00:23:59.519 --> 00:24:05.759
Throw in sexuality, aging, independence, illness, misfortune, and knowledge.
00:24:06.000 --> 00:24:09.519
Find somebody who doesn't quite behave as expected.
00:24:09.759 --> 00:24:14.079
Give somebody powerful enough the authority to call them dangerous.
00:24:14.319 --> 00:24:16.799
Write down what a witch supposedly does.
00:24:17.039 --> 00:24:19.039
Describe who she's supposed to meet.
00:24:19.200 --> 00:24:21.359
Describe what she's supposed to believe.
00:24:21.599 --> 00:24:23.519
Then start looking for her.
00:24:23.759 --> 00:24:27.920
And if you can't find evidence of witchcraft, look at her body.
00:24:28.240 --> 00:24:34.000
Eventually, anything can become suspicious if you're determined enough to make it fit.
00:24:34.240 --> 00:24:38.400
Write it, print it, paint it, tell stories about it.
00:24:38.640 --> 00:24:41.599
And eventually put it on a cinema screen.
00:24:41.839 --> 00:24:47.200
That's perhaps the most important thing we've learned today, and the most terrifying.
00:24:47.440 --> 00:24:51.039
There wasn't one moment when somebody invented the witch.
00:24:51.440 --> 00:24:52.880
She accumulated.
00:24:53.279 --> 00:24:57.920
Heinrich Kramer helped codify one particularly vicious vision of her.
00:25:02.000 --> 00:25:05.759
Witchhammer shows us the human consequences of believing them.
00:25:06.000 --> 00:25:10.160
The Crucible shows us how accusation can become its own evidence.
00:25:10.400 --> 00:25:17.119
And The Witch shows us that centuries later, those fears can still make extraordinary horror.
00:25:18.000 --> 00:25:25.680
I'm Millie Hardy Ashton, and this has been Hexposition, where witches on screen are never just witches.
00:25:26.400 --> 00:25:30.240
The theme music was Holder Folk, Hidden Folk by Jamie Sims.
00:25:30.960 --> 00:25:35.039
And next time we're going to take one piece of the witch we've built today.
00:25:35.279 --> 00:25:38.720
Perhaps the most immediately recognizable piece of all.
00:25:39.039 --> 00:25:42.400
If I draw a woman wearing one, you know she's a witch.
00:25:42.640 --> 00:25:47.759
If I put one on a child at Halloween, you know exactly what they're dressed as.
00:25:48.000 --> 00:25:53.200
The Wicked Witch of the West made herds one of the most famous pieces of costume in cinema history.
00:25:53.440 --> 00:25:56.160
An elphabet would eventually inherit it.
00:25:56.400 --> 00:25:58.240
But here's the strange thing.
00:25:58.480 --> 00:26:05.279
Women accused during the European Witch Trials weren't wandering around in enormous black pointed hats.
00:26:05.599 --> 00:26:09.200
So, where did the witch's hat actually come from?
00:26:09.440 --> 00:26:12.720
And why did cinema make sure she never took it off?
00:26:13.200 --> 00:26:15.519
That's next time on Hexposition.
00:26:15.759 --> 00:26:17.920
Until then, watch carefully.
00:26:18.160 --> 00:26:25.680
Because sometimes the most interesting things about a witch isn't the spell she's casting, it's who taught you how to recognize her.
00:26:26.160 --> 00:26:29.359
Hexposition is a familiar footsteps production.
00:26:35.839 --> 00:26:37.279
Love and light.
00:00:01.199 --> 00:00:03.759
There is a witch you already know.
00:00:04.000 --> 00:00:05.919
You've seen her before.
00:00:06.320 --> 00:00:08.560
Perhaps she's hunched over a cauldron.
00:00:08.880 --> 00:00:14.640
Perhaps she has a hooked nose, wrinkled skin, and a wart somewhere prominently visible.
00:00:14.960 --> 00:00:17.440
Maybe there's an animal beside her.
00:00:17.679 --> 00:00:19.359
Maybe she lives alone.
00:00:19.760 --> 00:00:22.399
Perhaps she's old and ugly.
00:00:23.280 --> 00:00:25.280
Perhaps she's young and beautiful.
00:00:25.519 --> 00:00:31.920
Although if she is, there's a reasonable chance the film will eventually reveal that she was old and ugly all along.
00:00:32.159 --> 00:00:40.640
She might seduce men, steal children, curse babies, poison crops, fly through the night, gather secretly with other women.
00:00:40.880 --> 00:00:44.159
She might even have something unusual on her body.
00:00:44.399 --> 00:00:46.479
A mole, a scar, a birthmark.
00:00:46.640 --> 00:00:51.679
Something that tells us that beneath the ordinary exterior, there is something else.
00:00:51.920 --> 00:00:53.600
Something unnatural.
00:00:53.840 --> 00:00:55.119
Something wicked.
00:00:55.359 --> 00:00:56.640
You know this woman.
00:00:56.880 --> 00:01:02.880
Even if you've never believed in witchcraft for a single second, you know what you're supposed to look for.
00:01:03.200 --> 00:01:08.159
Which is rather strange, because nobody's ever actually met her.
00:01:08.480 --> 00:01:19.040
She was assembled, piece by piece, fear by fear, story by story, until eventually somebody tried to write the instructions down.
00:01:19.359 --> 00:01:26.640
And centuries before filmmakers could simply point a camera at a woman and make an audience recognize a witch.
00:01:26.879 --> 00:01:31.599
Authorities were already trying to work out how to identify one.
00:01:31.920 --> 00:01:35.680
Today's hidden hex isn't hidden inside a spell.
00:01:35.920 --> 00:01:41.439
It's hidden somewhere much more disturbing on the witch herself.
00:01:41.680 --> 00:01:47.040
And once you know what you're looking for, you start seeing its fingerprints everywhere.
00:01:53.040 --> 00:02:05.760
Hello and welcome to Hexposition, the podcast where we put witches on screen under the microscope and uncover the history, folklore, and cultural baggage hiding beneath the pointy hats.
00:02:06.000 --> 00:02:10.960
I'm Millie Hardy Ashton, and this is a Familiar Footsteps production.
00:02:11.360 --> 00:02:18.560
Last time we went all the way back to one of Western culture's earliest and most enduring magical women, Cersei.
00:02:18.800 --> 00:02:27.919
Goddess, enchantress, monster, victim, temptress, feminist icon, depending entirely upon who is telling the story.
00:02:28.080 --> 00:02:32.639
But Cersei belongs to a world where magic is simply part of the landscape.
00:02:32.960 --> 00:02:38.240
Gods interfere with mortals, prophecies are real, people transform into animals.
00:02:38.479 --> 00:02:42.000
Magic does not automatically make somebody evil.
00:02:42.319 --> 00:02:46.560
Eventually, Western culture begins doing something rather different.
00:02:46.800 --> 00:02:50.319
It stops asking, what can a magical woman do?
00:02:50.560 --> 00:02:55.120
And starts asking, what kind of woman must a witch be?
00:02:55.599 --> 00:02:58.800
That distinction matters enormously.
00:02:59.039 --> 00:03:05.280
Because the witch we recognize from film and television didn't spring fully formed from folklore.
00:03:05.520 --> 00:03:08.000
She was constructed over centuries.
00:03:08.319 --> 00:03:18.479
Religion, politics, misogyny, superstition, art, literature, demonology, witch hunting, and eventually cinema.
00:03:19.280 --> 00:03:22.240
So today we're going to do something slightly dangerous.
00:03:22.479 --> 00:03:25.439
We're going to build a witch.
00:03:25.759 --> 00:03:28.000
Not literally, I don't have the insurance.
00:03:28.240 --> 00:03:34.879
We're going to take apart the cultural witch and work out where some of her most enduring characteristics came from.
00:03:35.120 --> 00:03:42.960
And our main guide today is one of the strangest, most unsettling, and most important early films about witchcraft ever made.
00:03:43.280 --> 00:03:47.680
Benjamin Christensen's 1922 film Haxon.
00:03:48.319 --> 00:03:56.400
Part documentary, part horror, part historical reconstruction, part lecture, and completely bonkers.
00:03:56.879 --> 00:04:05.599
We'll also encounter Witch Hammer, The Crucible, and briefly Robert Egger's The Witch, because together they reveal something fascinating.
00:04:05.759 --> 00:04:08.560
The screen witch didn't begin with cinema.
00:04:08.960 --> 00:04:15.520
Filmmakers inherited a character European culture had already spent centuries designing.
00:04:15.759 --> 00:04:17.519
Welcome to episode three.
00:04:17.759 --> 00:04:19.680
The Hammer of Witches.
00:04:24.959 --> 00:04:27.439
Before the Witch Had a Uniform.
00:04:28.079 --> 00:04:34.720
If I ask you to picture a witch, chances are your brain supplies a surprisingly specific image.
00:04:35.040 --> 00:04:44.800
Black clothes, pointed hat, broomstick, cauldron, cat, maybe warts, possibly green skin if the Wizard of Oz got to you early enough.
00:04:45.040 --> 00:04:48.720
But historically there was no single witch uniform.
00:04:49.040 --> 00:04:50.079
There couldn't be.
00:04:50.319 --> 00:04:56.079
Beliefs surrounding magic existed across cultures long before the European witch trials.
00:04:56.560 --> 00:05:03.199
But those pe but those beliefs weren't necessarily describing the same person, practice, or even concept.
00:05:03.360 --> 00:05:23.600
There were healers, diviners, cunning folk, herbalists, people who made charms, people who claimed to find lost objects, people accused of curses, people believed to communicate with spirits, and people who practiced forms of folk magic while simultaneously considering themselves perfectly good Christians.
00:05:24.160 --> 00:05:29.839
Our modern categories don't always work when we try to force them backwards onto historical people.
00:05:30.319 --> 00:05:37.519
And magic itself wasn't necessarily divided neatly into witchcraft equals evil and religion equals good.
00:05:37.839 --> 00:05:40.319
That binary had to develop.
00:05:40.639 --> 00:05:50.800
Over the medieval period, Christian theologians increasingly connected ideas about harmful magic with heresy and ultimately with the Christian devil.
00:05:50.959 --> 00:05:53.680
And that produces an important transformation.
00:05:53.920 --> 00:05:59.759
The dangerous magical practitioner isn't simply somebody who can harm you anymore.
00:05:59.920 --> 00:06:04.959
The witch becomes somebody whose magic represents allegiance to an enemy of God.
00:06:05.199 --> 00:06:07.360
That changes everything.
00:06:07.600 --> 00:06:14.720
Because witchcraft is no longer merely something you do, it can become something authorities believe you are.
00:06:15.199 --> 00:06:22.000
And gradually, theologians and demonologists construct an extraordinary mythology around that identity.
00:06:22.319 --> 00:06:25.600
Witches supposedly make pacts with the devil.
00:06:25.759 --> 00:06:30.079
They supposedly gather secretly, they supposedly fly through night.
00:06:30.319 --> 00:06:37.040
They supposedly have sexual relationships with demons, attack fertility, harm children, renounce Christianity.
00:06:37.279 --> 00:06:42.879
And if you're currently thinking, hang on, that sounds suspiciously like a horror film, exactly.
00:06:43.199 --> 00:06:45.920
But these ideas don't all appear at once.
00:06:46.160 --> 00:06:47.680
And that's really important.
00:06:48.319 --> 00:06:53.920
There wasn't a meeting where everyone sat down and agreed upon the official witch cinematic universe.
00:06:54.160 --> 00:06:57.920
The witch we recognize today is more like a collage.
00:06:58.319 --> 00:07:01.120
Different periods keep sticking things onto her.
00:07:01.360 --> 00:07:13.360
Folklore contributes something, theology contributes something, demonology contributes something, witch trials, artists, writers, eventually filmmakers inherit the entire scrapbook.
00:07:13.680 --> 00:07:22.000
And one particular 15th century writer would become notorious for trying to organize some of those ideas into something systematic.
00:07:22.639 --> 00:07:25.120
His name was Heinrich Kramer.
00:07:25.759 --> 00:07:34.879
But we'll come back to him because before we meet the man who tried to explain witches, I want to show you what happened when cinema tried to show us one.
00:07:40.480 --> 00:07:46.319
In 1922, Danish filmmaker Benjamin Christensen released Hackson.
00:07:46.560 --> 00:07:49.519
The title simply means The Witch.
00:07:49.839 --> 00:07:54.639
And if you've ever watched Hackson, it is genuinely difficult to describe.
00:07:54.879 --> 00:07:59.279
It's a silent film, but it isn't quite a conventional narrative film.
00:07:59.519 --> 00:08:07.680
It's partly an illustrated history of witchcraft, partly dramatized reconstruction, partly horror, and partly social commentary.
00:08:07.920 --> 00:08:09.759
Christensen appears himself.
00:08:09.920 --> 00:08:22.160
There are models, diagrams, historical illustrations, demons, nuns, witches, torture, and a spectacularly unpleasant devil played, incidentally, by Christensen himself.
00:08:22.480 --> 00:08:28.800
Essentially, imagine somebody from 1922 giving you a lecture about witchcraft.
00:08:29.040 --> 00:08:34.000
Except occasionally the PowerPoint comes alive and Satan starts sticking his tongue out at people.
00:08:34.240 --> 00:08:42.960
And I mean this as an enormous compliment, because Huxon does something extraordinarily important for the history of the screen witch.
00:08:43.200 --> 00:08:59.360
Christensen researched historical witchcraft literature and imagery, including the notorious Mallius Malificarum, and he takes imagery that had existed in manuscripts, woodcuts, theological writing, paintings, and folklore, and gives it movement.
00:09:00.080 --> 00:09:03.279
We see witches brewing, women flying.
00:09:03.519 --> 00:09:11.120
We see the witch's Sabbath, we see demons, we see grotesque bodies, we see supposed supernatural practices.
00:09:11.360 --> 00:09:16.799
The imagined witch steps off the historical page and on to the cinema screen.
00:09:17.039 --> 00:09:19.120
And look at the body cinema gives her.
00:09:19.440 --> 00:09:22.320
Aging, grotesque, sexualized, other.
00:09:22.799 --> 00:09:26.240
It's a body that reflects centuries of cultural suspicion.
00:09:26.480 --> 00:09:31.200
But here's what makes Huxon much more interesting than simply an early horror film.
00:09:31.440 --> 00:09:35.759
Christensen doesn't merely reproduce witch hunting fantasies as fact.
00:09:35.919 --> 00:09:39.440
He also turns the camera towards the people making the accusations.
00:09:39.679 --> 00:09:48.399
We see interrogation, we see coercion, we see torture, we see suggestion producing increasingly elaborate confessions.
00:09:48.639 --> 00:09:52.480
One accusation produces another and another and another.
00:09:52.720 --> 00:09:56.320
Suddenly the horror isn't simply what if witches exist.
00:09:56.720 --> 00:10:01.279
It's what happens when everybody becomes convinced that they do.
00:10:02.000 --> 00:10:06.000
And that's why Hackson is such an important film for Hex position.
00:10:06.320 --> 00:10:17.200
Because almost as soon as cinema begins substantially visualizing the traditional European witch, cinema also begins questioning who constructed her.
00:10:17.519 --> 00:10:22.879
And nearly 50 years later, another European film pushes that question even further.
00:10:23.360 --> 00:10:27.279
You'll have to forgive my pronunciation here, I don't speak Czech.
00:10:27.679 --> 00:10:28.720
Witch Hammer.
00:10:28.879 --> 00:10:35.759
In 1970, Czech director Ottaka Wavra released a film that translates to Witch Hammer.
00:10:35.919 --> 00:10:39.600
And by this time, there's very little spectacular magic.
00:10:39.840 --> 00:10:47.600
No green faces, no sparkling spells, no broomstick chases, because Witch Hammer understands something much more frightening.
00:10:48.159 --> 00:10:50.399
Magic doesn't have to be real.
00:10:50.799 --> 00:10:53.279
The accusation is enough.
00:10:53.679 --> 00:10:57.919
The film dramatizes 17th century witch trials in Moravia.
00:10:58.159 --> 00:11:00.159
Suspicion becomes interrogation.
00:11:00.399 --> 00:11:02.159
Interrogation becomes torture.
00:11:02.399 --> 00:11:04.080
Torture becomes confession.
00:11:06.799 --> 00:11:09.440
Somebody gives a name, that person is arrested.
00:11:09.679 --> 00:11:16.480
Pain produces another confession, another confession produces another name, and the machinery keeps moving.
00:11:16.720 --> 00:11:25.200
The witch isn't discovered, the witch is manufactured, which makes witch hammer almost the perfect companion to Hackson.
00:11:25.519 --> 00:11:31.360
Hackson shows us the mythology, witch hammer shows us what happens when institutions believe it.
00:11:31.519 --> 00:11:38.960
And because Vavra's film was produced in communist Czechoslovakia, witch persecution also becomes a political language.
00:11:39.279 --> 00:11:51.440
Authoritarianism, surveillance, forced confession, ideological conformity, the terrifying power of an institution that has already decided what the truth must be.
00:11:51.679 --> 00:11:57.360
And eventually, of course, the phrase witch hunt doesn't require witches at all.
00:11:57.840 --> 00:12:02.000
Which brings us to perhaps the most familiar screen version of that idea.
00:12:02.240 --> 00:12:03.200
The Crucible.
00:12:03.440 --> 00:12:15.360
Nicholas Heipner's 1996 adaptation of Arthur Miller's The Crucible stars Daniel Day Lewis as John Proctor, Winona Ryder as Abigail Williams, and Joan Allen as Elizabeth Proctor.
00:12:15.519 --> 00:12:23.759
And although Miller's play takes enormous dramatic liberties with the historical Salem witch trials, the mechanism should now sound very familiar.
00:12:24.000 --> 00:12:26.480
The invisible crime has supposedly occurred.
00:12:26.720 --> 00:12:29.519
The authorities accept that the crime is possible.
00:12:29.759 --> 00:12:38.159
Accusations become evidence, confessions are rewarded, denials become suspicious, and suddenly innocence is almost impossible to prove.
00:12:38.399 --> 00:12:40.960
That's the trap at the centre of witch hunting.
00:12:41.120 --> 00:12:42.799
If you confess, you're a witch.
00:12:43.039 --> 00:12:47.039
If you refuse to confess, your refusal can itself be a confession.
00:12:47.200 --> 00:12:54.559
And if the crime you're accused of committing is supernatural, what physical evidence could possibly prove you didn't do it?
00:12:54.879 --> 00:12:58.639
Unless, of course, people start looking for evidence on you.
00:12:59.039 --> 00:13:02.080
Keep that thought, because it's going to matter.
00:13:16.559 --> 00:13:20.639
The Mallius Maleficarum caused the European witch trials.
00:13:20.879 --> 00:13:23.679
Fact, fiction, or folklore?
00:13:23.919 --> 00:13:29.519
The answer is mostly fiction, with one enormous factual footnote.
00:13:29.919 --> 00:13:42.879
The Malleus Maleficarum, usually translated as the Hammer of Witches, was written by the Dominican Inquisitor Heinrich Kramer and first published in the late 15th century, and it became notorious.
00:13:43.120 --> 00:13:46.000
But Kramer did not invent the witch.
00:13:46.240 --> 00:13:53.360
He didn't invent witch hunting, and Europe did not simply receive the Malleus, read it, and collectively start burning women.
00:13:53.679 --> 00:13:56.879
Witch persecutions varied enormously.
00:13:57.120 --> 00:14:04.320
Different regions, different legal systems, different periods, different religious authorities, and different local circumstances.
00:14:04.559 --> 00:14:10.720
Some places prosecuted enormous numbers of people, and others prosecuted comparatively few.
00:14:10.879 --> 00:14:16.399
And the Malleus was never universally accepted as the European witch hunting law book.
00:14:16.639 --> 00:14:18.799
But here's the factual footnote.
00:14:19.039 --> 00:14:21.039
The book was influential.
00:14:21.279 --> 00:14:26.639
It circulated through print, it gathered existing beliefs about witchcraft and demonology together.
00:14:26.879 --> 00:14:30.320
It presented them with the appearance of systematic authority.
00:14:30.480 --> 00:14:34.559
And crucially for us, it was profoundly misogynistic.
00:14:35.679 --> 00:14:45.840
Cramer, Kramer, however you want to pronounce it, argued that women were particularly susceptible to witchcraft, weaker in faith, more impressionable, more carnal?
00:14:46.000 --> 00:14:54.799
Female sexuality becomes dangerous, female behavior becomes suspicious, female bodies become vulnerable to interpretation.
00:14:55.120 --> 00:14:58.480
So did Heinrich Kramer invent witchcraft?
00:14:58.720 --> 00:14:59.519
Fiction.
00:14:59.759 --> 00:15:03.360
Did the Malleus single-handedly cause the European witch trials?
00:15:03.679 --> 00:15:04.559
Fiction.
00:15:04.960 --> 00:15:14.399
Did texts, like the Malleus Malificarum, help codify and decimate an increasingly elaborate idea of what a witch supposedly was?
00:15:14.799 --> 00:15:15.440
Fact.
00:15:15.919 --> 00:15:21.279
And that distinction matters because Kramer wasn't creating a monster from nothing.
00:15:21.600 --> 00:15:29.200
He was helping to give an existing cultural monster a description, which brings us back to that mole from the beginning.
00:15:42.960 --> 00:15:50.000
A mole, a scar, a birthmark, something unusual, something that told everybody else what she really was.
00:15:50.159 --> 00:15:52.240
And here is today's hidden hex.
00:15:52.480 --> 00:15:55.120
The witch's body became evidence.
00:15:55.440 --> 00:16:01.440
Heinrich Kramer was deeply interested in the supposed physical and sexual reality of witchcraft.
00:16:01.679 --> 00:16:09.519
His obsession with women and sexuality had already caused problems during his attempted prosecutions at Innsbruck in 1485.
00:16:09.759 --> 00:16:13.519
And after that failure, he produced the Malleus Maleficarum.
00:16:13.759 --> 00:16:16.480
But we need an important historical distinction here.
00:16:16.799 --> 00:16:23.200
Kramer did not personally invent every bodily test later associated with witch hunting.
00:16:23.440 --> 00:16:31.919
Over the following centuries, demonology and witch hunting culture developed increasingly elaborate ideas about identifying witches physically.
00:16:32.080 --> 00:16:34.080
One was the devil's mark.
00:16:34.320 --> 00:16:38.480
The idea that the devil might mark somebody who had entered into a pact with him.
00:16:38.639 --> 00:16:46.159
And then there's the so-called witch's teeth, supposedly an abnormal part of the body from which a familiar spirit might feed.
00:16:47.039 --> 00:16:52.159
And when people went looking for these things, ordinary bodies became evidence.
00:16:52.399 --> 00:16:59.120
A mole, a birthmark, a scar, a skin tag, an unusually shaped nipple.
00:16:59.360 --> 00:17:03.919
Something that didn't respond to pain in the way an examiner expected.
00:17:04.640 --> 00:17:12.000
And if you already decided the person in front of you might be the witch, almost anything unusual can become proof.
00:17:12.160 --> 00:17:14.480
And I'm laughing because it's laughable.
00:17:15.440 --> 00:17:18.400
This produces a horrifying logical problem.
00:17:18.799 --> 00:17:23.759
Once the body itself can betray you, how do you prove that you're not a witch?
00:17:24.079 --> 00:17:27.599
And that idea has never really left screen horror.
00:17:27.920 --> 00:17:32.000
The theology changes, the storytelling device doesn't.
00:17:32.319 --> 00:17:36.799
How often does film tell us that supernatural evil leaves a mark?
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A symbol appears on the skin, eyes change colour, a scar reveals someone's identity, a body transforms.
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Something apparently ordinary becomes physically other.
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We still expect supernatural identity to become visible, and suddenly Hackson becomes even more interesting because cinema can do something the demonologist's book can't.
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It can show us the imagined witch.
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A grotesque old woman, a flying witch, a sexual woman associated with demons, a strange body, a threatening body, a body that tells the audience this woman is different.
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And once cinema learns how to do that, it doesn't have to explain the history.
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The audience simply learns the shorthand.
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Which brings us to a much more recent film, The Witch.
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Jump forward almost a century from Hackson to Robert Eggers' 2015 film The Witch, starring Anya Taylor Joy as Thomasin.
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Eggers deliberately builds the film around the language, religious worldview, and supernatural fears of 17th century New England.
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And the witch who emerges from that world isn't a representation of what modern practising witches actually do.
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She's something much more relevant to the episode.
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She's the witch Puritan society feared.
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She harms children, she threatens the family, she uses children's bodies in magic.
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She seduces, she flies, she gathers with other witches, and she is explicitly connected to the devil.
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And then there's Black Philip, a goat, a familiar-looking animal association, a satanic presence, and one of modern horror's most memorable invitations to live deliciously.
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What makes the witch so fascinating is that nearly 500 years after Kramer, a filmmaker can reach back into the imagined world of early modern witchcraft, and audiences still recognize the monster.
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That's the legacy we're tracing, not an unbroken line from one book to one film trope, something much messier.
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Demonology, folklore, trial narratives, art, literature, theatre, cinema, television.
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Each generation inherits the witch and adds something else onto her.
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So, what does any of this have to do with the witch we recognize today?
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Almost everything.
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Because cinema didn't invent the visual language of witchcraft, it inherited one.
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Before filmmakers ever needed an audience to recognise a witch, European culture had spent centuries attempting to identify her.
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What does she do?
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Who does she meet?
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Where does she go?
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What does she believe?
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What does she do to children?
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What does she do to men?
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What does she do with her own body?
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What does her body look like?
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And that last question is particularly powerful for cinema, because film is visual.
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The quickest way to tell an audience somebody is different is to make them look different.
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And that is exactly what happens to the screen witch.
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Her age can mark her, her sexuality can mark her, her behavior can mark her, her body can mark her, and eventually her clothes can mark her.
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And none of these screen conventions have one neat origin.
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That's the point.
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The witch is a cultural collage.
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Take the witch's mark.
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Modern supernatural stories still repeatedly give magical or cursed characters bodily signs of what they are.
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The historical belief largely disappeared.
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The storytelling language survives.
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Take the old witch.
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Aging female bodies become associated with ugliness, decay, and supernatural danger.
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Cinema inherits the hag and makes her instantly recognizable.
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Take the seductive witch.
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Centuries of anxiety surrounding female sexuality become enchantment, glamour, and dangerous beauty.
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Take children.
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Historical accusations repeatedly connect witchcraft with fertility, infant mortality, and harm to children.
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And fictional witches continue stealing them, eating them, cursing them, and taking their youth.
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Take the secret gathering.
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Historical fantasies about the witch's Sabbath eventually contribute to our understanding of the coven.
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Later films and television will do fascinating things with that idea.
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Sometimes they'll make the gathering frightening, sometimes they'll reclaim it, and sometimes they'll turn it into friendship, sisterhood, or chosen family.
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But those are stories for later in this season.
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For now, the important thing is cinema inherits a witch who is already supposed to be recognizable.
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That's what makes Hackson such an extraordinary hero text for this episode.
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Christensen is standing remarkably close to the moment when centuries of static witch imagery become moving screen language.
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The demonologist describes her, the artist draws her, the storyteller repeats her, the filmmaker gives her a body, and the audience learns to recognize her.
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Then Witch Hammer shows us what happens when the institution decides that imagined witch is real.
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The crucible gives modern audiences one of the most recognizable stories about what happens when accusation becomes evidenced.
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And the witch demonstrates that filmmakers can still reach back into that historical nightmare and make it terrifying today.
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The witch hunters didn't discover the witch.
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Heinrich Kramer didn't single-handedly invent her.
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Benjamin Christensen didn't invent the screen witch, but somewhere between the demonologist's page and the filmmaker's camera, the imaginary witch acquired a body.
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And once audiences could recognize that body, filmmakers no longer needed to tell us she was a witch.
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They could simply show us.
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Mix in religious anxiety.
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Throw in sexuality, aging, independence, illness, misfortune, and knowledge.
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Find somebody who doesn't quite behave as expected.
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Give somebody powerful enough the authority to call them dangerous.
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Write down what a witch supposedly does.
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Describe who she's supposed to meet.
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Describe what she's supposed to believe.
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Then start looking for her.
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And if you can't find evidence of witchcraft, look at her body.
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Eventually, anything can become suspicious if you're determined enough to make it fit.
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Write it, print it, paint it, tell stories about it.
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And eventually put it on a cinema screen.
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That's perhaps the most important thing we've learned today, and the most terrifying.
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There wasn't one moment when somebody invented the witch.
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She accumulated.
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Heinrich Kramer helped codify one particularly vicious vision of her.
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Witchhammer shows us the human consequences of believing them.
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The Crucible shows us how accusation can become its own evidence.
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And The Witch shows us that centuries later, those fears can still make extraordinary horror.
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I'm Millie Hardy Ashton, and this has been Hexposition, where witches on screen are never just witches.
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The theme music was Holder Folk, Hidden Folk by Jamie Sims.
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And next time we're going to take one piece of the witch we've built today.
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Perhaps the most immediately recognizable piece of all.
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If I draw a woman wearing one, you know she's a witch.
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If I put one on a child at Halloween, you know exactly what they're dressed as.
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The Wicked Witch of the West made herds one of the most famous pieces of costume in cinema history.
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An elphabet would eventually inherit it.
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But here's the strange thing.
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Women accused during the European Witch Trials weren't wandering around in enormous black pointed hats.
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So, where did the witch's hat actually come from?
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And why did cinema make sure she never took it off?
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That's next time on Hexposition.
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Until then, watch carefully.
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Because sometimes the most interesting things about a witch isn't the spell she's casting, it's who taught you how to recognize her.
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Hexposition is a familiar footsteps production.
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Love and light.
