Preview: Haxan: Witchcraft Through The Ages, Touring, Various Venues

The silent film composer Geoff Smith will perform a live soundtrack on three hammered dulcimers to the shocking 1922 silent drama-documentary Haxan: Witch-craft Through the Ages. This is Smith's third live cinema event after his atmospheric scores for The Cabinet of Dr Caligari in 2003 and Faust in 2005.

Benjamin Christensen's intense psychological masterpiece was banned in Europe when it was released in the 1920s. It is a series of dramatised scenes of the persecution of witches in the Middle Ages, including demonstrations of torture devices, fantastical confessions and orgy scenes, along with stills of artworks relating to witchcraft and satanic rituals.

"The original score to the film by the Danish composer and violinist Jacob Gade was a substandard orchestral score, full of clichés, that didn't relate intimately to what was happening in the film," Smith says. "In the 1968 shortened version, the William S Burroughs narration and a score by the jazz violinist Jean-Luc Ponty spoilt it. I didn't feel that either of these soundtracks did the film justice."

The composer now uses his own voice as a melodic instrument along with the dulcimers to create "a quiet, ethereal, haunting sound". He uses the first prototype microtonal dulcimer to incorporate his invention, the "microtonal fluid tuning mechanism," a system that allows bespoke tuning to the instrument, which is played with mallets.

"It gives me a wider palette to work with, but as I was evolving the tuning for the film I had to adjust to the notes not being in the same position. This is actually very stressful because it takes time to get used to the new notes."

The other two hammered dulcimers are a customised chromatic dulcimer "with the fixed tuning of a piano" but with "repeating notes" and a customised traditional dulcimer with a big extended bass and treble section. "Musically, it is demanding," Smith says.

Touring the UK from 22 April (www.dulcimer.co.uk)