Christensen also makes use of the grotesque in scenes in Häxan that recreate a witches’ Sabbath, drawing on not just Bosch’s hellscapes but also Francisco Goya’s Witches’ Sabbath (1798), with its horned devil, and Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s Dull Gret (1563), which depicts an army of women on their way to pillage hell. The grotesque, as theorist Philip Thomson points out in his 1972 work on the literary mode, elicits both disgust and fascination, humor and terror. These contradictions are especially vivid in what feminist scholars call the “female grotesque,” an aesthetic that reveals binary ideas of women as either hags or temptresses, angels or whores. As Häxan shows, the figure of the witch encompasses such dualisms; she may be “young and beautiful,” Christensen tells the viewer, or “old and miserable.” The female grotesque also relies on a long-standing cultural association of women with nature that is not always empowering. For example, in the third part of the film, a woman identified as Maria the weaver confesses, after being tortured by monks, that she is a witch who has given birth to many children fathered by the devil. This is illustrated by a parade of monstrous animal-human forms emerging from between her legs.

Elsewhere in Häxan’s re-creations, the grotesque appears in concert with a carnivalesque atmosphere, suggesting an intersection of gender and social class: witches are not only women, they are poor women. Christensen associates the witches with the carnivalesque through scenes of excessive and uncouth eating and other bodily functions—a pair of witches urinate in the street, fashioning a charm against their social betters. The carnivalesque lends the oppressed and impoverished a degree of power to subvert the usual social order and mock figures of authority. A witch’s love potion turns a pious priest into a lustful heathen, for example. As well as inviting laughter, Christensen is issuing a social critique that provokes sympathy for the plight of the poor. The witch Apelone is granted access to a “dream castle” in which the devil fulfills all her secret wishes, but the gold coins she finds inside disappear more quickly than she is able to gather them. Häxan also reveals the limits of the carnivalesque—the power it grants is, of course, only temporary, and the social hierarchy is quickly restored with repressive force.

The precarious nature of the witch’s power is evident in her shift from a figure of terror to a pitiful victim through the stories in Häxan of Maria the weaver and Anna, the printer’s wife. In these latter parts of the movie, Christensen focuses on the cruel practices of the clergy and witch­finders, who impose mental and physical torture on Anna, a young mother who has been accused of crimes she did not commit. While the priests are keen to “let her suffering begin,” Christensen laments the “ravages” of witch-hunting hysteria, which led to “one pyre after another.” Interestingly, Häxan is contemporaneous with the “witch-cult theory” of the English Egyptologist, archaeologist, anthropologist, and folklorist Margaret Murray, which she first advanced in the 1921 book The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, claiming that the early modern witch trials were the coordinated persecution of a matriarchal pagan religion, which they drove to extinction. Though Murray’s thesis has by now been thoroughly rejected by scholars, her association of witchcraft with the plight of women and other social outsiders who are targeted for persecution has cast a long cultural shadow. Christensen echoes some of Murray’s wilder claims when he tells viewers that the trials claimed eight million lives; the historical record suggests the number of those executed for witchcraft between 1400 and 1850 was more likely around eighty thousand.

These common myths about the witchcraft trials have often been bound up in feminist revisionist narratives, particularly in the work of second-wave feminists in the 1970s, which Christensen’s film anticipates. Like Christensen, those scholars drew on the literary tradition of the female gothic, which mediates women writers’ concerns about motherhood, a claustrophobic domestic ideology, and their relative powerlessness and social restriction through the language of the gothic and the fantastic. In many ways, Anna the printer's wife resembles a gothic heroine, incarcerated and mistreated by a corrupt and violent patriarchal authority.

Like the folk horror that has followed it, Häxan does not provide an easy position for the viewer. We are granted the role of voyeur, invited to enjoy the grotesque spectacles of the witch’s hovel and the riotous Sabbath. At the same time, we are encouraged to feel empathy for the impoverished and abused. The movie excites horror and disgust but also pity and humor. There is an obvious critique of women’s precarious status (it is dangerous to be old and ugly but also to be young and pretty), but Häxan also reinforces early modern stereotypes that are rooted in misogyny. The association of women with hysteria, depicted in the nuns’ contagious insanity late in the film, is likewise informed by patriarchal pathologies of female behavior. Häxan flirts with gothic transgression in scenes depicting nakedness, torture, sex, violence, and the eating of corpses, a kind of spectacle that ultimately serves to undercut its social critique, since the grotesque serves neither reactionary nor radical ends. Yet viewers cannot but be moved by the movie’s final images and the words of the aging witch who sees the devil at her bedside: “I am a broken person.” By complicating the age-old stereotype of the evil witch, Christensen not only inaugurated a tradition of continual reinvention of the figure within horror cinema, he also gave us an ambiguous representation of female power and victimhood that remains effective to this day.