Häxan - A Soundtrack Nick Carlisle

"Häxan - A Soundtrack" comprises highlights from a Queen's Film Theatre, Belfast-commissioned score for the 1922 silent film directed by Benjamin Christensen 📽

Nick performed the new score live for the first time at a screening of Häxan at QFT on 24th November 2022, as part of the BFI's UK-wide "In Dreams Are Monsters" season of horror films. He has since taken the show to cinemas around the UK and Ireland, including two sold out performances at the Barbican, London, and a performance at the UK's oldest purpose-built cinema, the Duke Of York's Picturehouse in Brighton.

"‘Häxan’ is a sensational piece of work that puts Carlisle’s accomplished synth work front and centre. It’s perfect for soundtracking film and it would be no surprise if this were to act as a launch pad for more of them." - Beats To The Bar, beatstothebar.com/reviews/7-releases-weve-loved-in-november/

THE FILM

Supposedly intended as a moral education tool, Häxan instead is ripe, bawdy, and more than likely to give you sympathy for the devil. Director Benjamin Christiansen took the Malleus Maleficarum – the medieval witch finder’s handbook – and made a documentary on witches. Having it deliciously both ways, Christiansen’s film gives us incubuses seducing maidens, medieval torture devices and witches’ sabbaths, while also unpacking the myth of the witch as a tool of oppression. Full of sumptuous recreations – in brilliant red and blue filters – of witch burnings, goblin parties and ostentatious devilry, on its release Häxan was the most expensive Swedish film yet made. A phantasmagoria worthy of William Blake or Albrecht Durer, it’s guaranteed to make you look askance at a church gargoyle and see silent film in a new light.

THE MUSIC

"I was delighted to be asked to compose for this project. I previously played in a band called "Katy and Nick" which had quite a sinister feel, where Mellotron cellos and strangely medieval clarion calls inhabited a kind of fever dream space. So Häxan in many ways doesn't feel like such a foreign place to visit. I took the decision to keep only a loose eye on the sounds and styles I would use - there is the odd reference to the European shamanic Sámi drum, and the doomy Mellotron and synthesisers used are played in such a way to squeeze them more or less into a 15th Century timeframe. But in the main, since the film ultimately deals with the pitfalls of human ignorance and imagination, I relied on my own to lead the way, for better or worse.”

Commissioned by Queen’s Film Theatre as part of In Dreams Are Monsters: A Season of Horror Films, a UK-wide film season supported by the National Lottery and BFI Film Audience Network. indreamsaremonsters.co.uk