Come early for our apéritif hour with a drinks bar and complementary nibbles before the film – a chance to mingle, chat and start the evening in true Salon style. 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.

Description supplied by the event organiser.