For a period when I was in high school, my father believed that I had taken up worshipping the devil. And, looking through my old t-shirts from that era, I can understand why: the screaming demon faces of Skinny Puppy; the arcane symbols of Sisters of Mercy; My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult with its Day-Glo cherub and the back proclaiming Kooler Than Jesus. When I played my music, he called them funeral songs. This was my rebellion; he had raised me on a steady stream of classical music and contemporary Vietnamese pop.
This what it must have been like for Lucifer; having discovered free will, he turned to God and said, “OK, Dad, enough with the harps already!” Is it any wonder, then, that in Häxan, the scenes of bedevilment (naked rumpus, broomstick-riding, frolicking demons) seem much more exciting than those of piety (cold asceticism, accusatory eyes, gleeful coercion)? Even though the film is silent, you can imagine which scenes would have had a free-improv jazz soundtrack, and which would have been all Gregorian chants, all the time.
My enrapturement with Goth and industrial music was a phase that I grew out of after reaching college, but, in high school, it was necessary to establish my sense of self. Maybe all those funeral songs allowed me to commune with the spirits of my darker self: me, superimposed upon a whirling background to make me look as if I’m flying, as if I’m raging, as if spirits could flit in and out of my corporeal body.
Häxan ends with a theory of displacement: those who were once classified as witches in the past, the film suggests, might now be regarded as mentally ill, suffering from Freudian psychosis, wherein they reject external reality and instead reshape it in their mind to detach from it entirely. But, I wonder, isn’t this the very definition of witchcraft: someone imposing their will upon the outside world? This man will love me if I give him a potion. My body will be borne aloft upon this broom.
But the external reality is: I’ve folded those t-shirts and packed them into my luggage, to be packed later into a plastic bin under my bed. Those CDs are in a cardboard box in the basement. I have displaced that part of myself. I don’t know why, but I bought all those t-shirts in size XXL, when, at the time, I weighed barely 120 pounds. They hung on my body like a black cloak. Maybe by wearing shirts with shocking, striking imagery, I could hide the actual person inside; turn invisible, as it were, flying through the day not as a scrawny little Asian boy, but as a worshipper of Skinny Puppy, of Ministry. An emissary of darker powers beyond the ken of mere mortals. I would transform this broken, unjust world. I would find fellow devotees of the mosh pit, of feedback, of horror and gurgled lyrics. I would welcome the Devil and kiss his ass.