THE DAMNED HOUSE OF HAJN. A stylish thriller

The Damned House of Hajn draws heavily from Italian giallo, European thrillers, and American Gothic literature. Czechoslovak Republic in the interwar period. Petr Švejcar, the descendant of a poor alcoholic and gambler, dreams of wealth and rapid social advancement. To achieve this, he marries the much younger Sonia, marrying into the wealthy Hajn industrialist family. The couple moves into the bride’s family home, also inhabited by her apathetic father, a domineering aunt who is effectively the head of the household, and her mentally ill uncle Cyryl.

Petr provokes dislike and suspicion among the household members, who doubt the sincerity of his intentions; to make matters worse, the Hajns deny the madness of the uncle, who is consumed by sexual obsession and believes he is invisible. Cyryl is committed to a psychiatric hospital only after an attempted rape of Sonia, who is so traumatized that she begins to slip into madness herself. Meanwhile, Petr starts an affair with a promiscuous maid and remains determined to take over the Hajns’ factory. After some time, it turns out that Sonia is pregnant. Jaroslav Havlíček published the novel The Invisible in 1937, and although the plot is fictional, the author drew heavily on real events and places (for instance, Jesenice is the literary version of Jilemnice, Havlíček’s hometown, and the Hajn house was based on the 19th-century Tauchmann Villa located there). In 1965, Jiří Bělka adapted The Invisible into the film Neviditelný—a modest black-and-white television production resembling a stage play. Jiří Svoboda took a different route: his adaptation of Havlíček’s work, The Damned House of Hajn, is a lavish, visually extravagant film full of colors reminiscent of the works of Mario Bava, Dario Argento, and surrealist painters. The frames are awash in deep blues or vivid yellows and oranges, and the shaky handheld shots, strange angles, and frequent use of fisheye lenses and other image distortions combine to create a dense, claustrophobic atmosphere. The Damned House of Hajn is a psychological drama or thriller that plays like a Gothic horror film in the vein of Andrzej Żuławski or Roman Polanski. The atmosphere of decadence and the portrayal of upper-class corruption evoke the spirit of Witkacy, though Svoboda’s plot arguably has the most in common with Edgar Allan Poe’s often-adapted short story The Fall of the House of Usher and Jean Ray’s Poe-inspired novel Malpertuis. The horror here arises not from supernatural forces but from purely human flaws: greed, selfishness, deceit, and a hereditary mental illness passed from generation to generation.

Added to this is a critique of bourgeois lifestyle and ruthless ambition; Svoboda was, for several years, chairman of the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia—and it is likely no coincidence that his hysterical, unsettling film was made on the eve of the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia.