Reece Shear­smith on nar­rat­ing Häx­an and folk horror’s time­ly revival

Instant­ly banned or else heav­i­ly cen­sored upon its release in 1922, Häx­an is a lit­tle-seen odd­i­ty from cinema’s silent era. A pre­cur­sor to the folk hor­ror sub-genre that was pop­u­larised in the 1960 and ​’70s, the film mas­ter­ful­ly com­bines hor­ror, doc­u­men­tary, ani­ma­tion and wood­cut tech­niques to take view­ers on a sur­re­al jour­ney through the his­to­ry of witchcraft.

Reece Shear­smith has been obsessed with Häx­an ever since dis­cov­er­ing it on British tele­vi­sion in his ear­ly teens – so much so that he revis­its it every year on Hal­loween. So when mul­ti-instru­men­tal­ist Stephen Horne approached Shear­smith per­form­ing direc­tor Ben­jamin Christensen’s orig­i­nal nar­ra­tion as part of a new live score, it was a dream come true for the actor, writer and come­di­an. Ahead of only their sec­ond ever pre­sen­ta­tion of Häx­an at Flat­pack Fes­ti­val in Birm­ing­ham lat­er this month, we caught up with the League of Gen­tle­man and Inside No. 9 co-cre­ator to find out just how the film has influ­enced his work, and why he’s rel­ish­ing the cur­rent folk hor­ror revival.

“One of the excit­ing things about Häx­an is how mod­ern it feels. It starts in this strange sort of doc­u­men­tary way with the direc­tor, Ben­jamin Chris­tensen, giv­ing you this lec­ture about the pot­ted his­to­ry of witch­craft and super­nat­ur­al, super­sti­tious beliefs. Then you get into this extra­or­di­nary sequence where they depict a witch’s hov­el, and there are these amaz­ing spe­cial effects that come out of nowhere with these witch­es fly­ing through the air and peo­ple giv­ing birth to mon­sters and dev­ils. It’s beau­ti­ful, and it’s got this strange fairy tale qual­i­ty that some­thing like Night of the Hunter has as well.

“That whole witch tri­al peri­od has always fas­ci­nat­ed me, and it’s very per­ti­nent to what’s hap­pen­ing today, I think. Obvi­ous­ly there was no #MeToo in the 14^th cen­tu­ry, but it’s inter­est­ing to watch it now and see how far and how lit­tle we’ve come. There’s a lot of humour in it too; Chris­tensen him­self plays the dev­il him­self which is quite fun­ny. It’s love­ly that peo­ple are inter­est­ed in the film again – William Bur­rows famous­ly did a voiceover for it when it was re-vis­it­ed and in fact re-edit­ed in the ​’60s, but since then it’s rarely been screened to the public.

“I first saw Häx­an on Chan­nel 4 one night, I must have been about 12 or 13 and it was around the time I was becom­ing aware of stuff like Todd Brown’s Freaks. I was already well into hor­ror, I had a lot of hor­ror books and even a wood­cut depict­ing Matthew Hop­kins, the witchfind­er gen­er­al, with all his demons and his imps. It had a big impact on me. There’s obvi­ous­ly the sub­ject mat­ter but there’s also some­thing about the crude­ness of it that makes it fright­en­ing. We’ve tried, in The League of Gen­tle­man and Inside No. 9, to use some of the same in-cam­era effects. There’s just some­thing great about the old-fash­ioned­ness of it.

“It’s inter­est­ing now to trace the lin­eage of Häx­an through films like The Wick­er Man and Witchfind­er Gen­er­al, and Ben Wheatley’s film, A Field in Eng­land, which I did. It’s that old Eng­lish sen­si­bil­i­ty of MR James, the hor­ror that comes from the land itself. There’s some­thing in the woods, you know. In The Wick­er Man you have the strange cultish­ness of that island that ensnares Edward Wood­ward, and in A Field in Eng­land there’s this cir­cu­lar ele­ment of tran­scen­den­tal expe­ri­ence, of get­ting onto a high­er plane. You have a sit­u­a­tion now where peo­ple of my gen­er­a­tion who grew up with these great ​’70s hor­rors are start­ing to revis­it those films in their own work. There’s a real com­fort in those films to me. I sup­pose I’m just try­ing to cling onto the things I loved when I was little.”

Flat­pack Fes­ti­val runs 13 – 22 April at var­i­ous venues across Birm­ing­ham. For info and tick­ets vis­it flat​pack​fes​ti​val​.org​.uk