Cinetopia Salon Halloween special: Häxan (1922) + Live music by Jane Gardner & Hazel Morrison This Halloween, experience one of early cinema’s most gloriously eerie and unsettling masterworks accompanied by an original live score from two exceptional Edinburgh-based musician/composers. 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. Jane Gardner is an Edinburgh-based pianist and composer with an extraordinary breadth of musical life behind her. She studied at York University and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland before completing a PhD in Composition at Goldsmiths College, London, and was awarded the prestigious Gullivar Bursary - nominated by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies - to study Indonesian music in Java and Bali. Her concert works have been commissioned by ensembles including the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Piano Circus, and she has composed for Shakespeare's Globe Theatre and acrobatic string group The Gogmagogs. As an orchestrator and music copyist, she has worked with composer and producer Jim Sutherland on the Disney Pixar soundtrack for Brave. As a silent film accompanist, Jane has performed at the BFI London, the Hippodrome in Bo'ness and at festivals and venues across the UK, bringing to each screening an instinctive feel for atmosphere and narrative that makes her one of the finest practitioners in the field. Hazel Morrison is a percussionist and timpanist who trained at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in the early 1990s. Her career spans an exceptional range: she has performed with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and Orchestra Scotland/Brazil, toured with folk rock band Cantara, and appeared at Celtic Connections with PJ Moore of The Blue Nile. A Danny Kyle Award winner both as a solo artist and in ensemble, she released her own solo album and is currently at work on a new one. Hazel also teaches and coaches young percussionists for Edinburgh City Council. She and Jane Gardner are long-standing collaborators on silent film accompaniments, and together they bring a dynamic, layered presence to the screen that is very much their own. 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.