Over the years various adaptations have been made of this tale, most of them fairly faithful to the prose. With a story this juicy there was really no need to change it too much, after all. For children of a certain generation The Walt Disney Company released what would be the definitive version for them, a short animated version that stuck to all the original beats including the final possible fate of Mr. Crane himself. For an animated film this one is actually frightening, juxtaposing some real scares in with a degree of absurdist humor. Children in the 80’s and 90’s saw it play on the Disney Channel during Halloween season and it appeared in various formats on home video. Its enduring popularity eventually encouraged Paramount pictured to adapt it for a live action release, originally slated to be a cheap slasher film. Disagreements amongst the director and studio saw it switch hands and Tim Burton was eventually hired to take over as the new director. Burton needed a hit after Mars Attacks! failed to strike gold at Warner Brothers. For Sleepy Hollow, much of the original story would get tossed by the wayside and replaced with a vastly different narrative, keeping the central characters but changing them almost completely. It was a bold choice and one that paid off at the box office.
In this version of the story, Ichabod Crane (Johnny Depp) is a police constable butting heads with his superiors over the inhumane conditions of the prisons as well as the backwards thinking when it comes to solving crimes. To get him out of their hair for a while, he is sent upstate to the town of Sleepy Hollow to use his new methods of detection to try and solve the mystery of several townsfolk who have recently been found beheaded. When he arrives he finds the townsfolk are terrified of what they call The Headless Horseman, a resurrected Hessian who was beheaded and buried in the woods during the revolutionary war. They are convinced the horseman has come back to life and is searching for his lost head while claiming the heads of the townsfolk in return.
Ichabod sets out to examine the bodies of the victims, determined to prove that there is no such thing as The Headless Horseman; the real killer must be a man or woman of flesh and blood using the legend to strike fear into the townsfolk. He will turn out to be only partially right on that assessment. While he is there more heads are claimed and Ichabod gets more than one brush up with the Horseman, even witnessing several of the murders. But his observational skills, and unusual methods eventually unravel a pattern to the killings as well as who might be benefiting from all this death. Jumbled up into all of this carnage and mysticism is Katrina Van Tassel (Christina Ricci), the daughter of wealthy Baltus Van Tassel (Michael Gambon) and his wife Mary (Miranda Richardson). Ichabod finds himself attracted to the young Katrina, much to the chagrin of Brom Van Brunt (Casper Van Dien) who has his own sights on the lovely girl.
Right out the gate it is obvious that this is a Tim Burton production. The visuals playing out over the credits set a tone reminiscent of the visual stylings of Burton. Perfectly accompanying those visuals is the distinctive melodies of Danny Elfman, frequent Tim Burton collaborator. This opening sets a tone for the rest of the picture and establishes a mood reminiscent of The Nightmare Before Christmas without the whimsical undertones of that film. This is a more mature film than anything Tim Burton has made up to this point with the exception of the biographical film Ed Wood. It also ramps up the violence immediately by leading off with a brutal double beheading, complete with blood spraying across the face of a Jack-o-lantern scarecrow. This is an R rated movie almost entirely from these beheadings, most of which happen on-screen.
Also a staple of Tim Burton, this film is filled with quirky imagery which at times is at odds with the grim nature of the story. Ichabod has many investigatory tools at his disposal, primarily of his own design. These objects have a steampunk look to them and contribute to making Ichabod look truly bizarre. At one point he will exhume the body of one of the victims, a widow, and perform a rather bloody autopsy on her to determine that she was pregnant. He emerges from the operating room covered from head to toe in blood, looking more demented than any horseman ever could. Johnny Depp plays off this imagery in much the same way he did a few years earlier in Edward Scissorhands, another Tim Burton film.
Sleepy Hollow brings in elements of witchcraft that did not exist in the original story. Katrina uses magical markings from a book of spells in an attempt to protect the ones she loves. These are mistaken as curses to draw the horseman to them. Likewise, in the woods lives an actual witch, one of two sisters who were forced out of their home in childhood by the Van Tassel family. This witch was directly involved in the capture and execution of the Horseman when he was originally alive. The scene where Ichabod visits her stands out for being nothing more than an exposition dump. It’s also heavily CGI’d in an era when CGI animation was not yet perfected and just looks cartoonish and cheesy. It’s meant to be scary but can’t quite pull it off.
Perhaps the biggest misstep this film makes is the choice to use Christopher Walken as the face of the Headless Horseman. Mercifully he is only seen in a few scenes, mostly in flashbacks. When you do see his face, complete with sharpened teeth, it is so silly and over the top that it loses all the menace the Horseman had. The Headless Horseman plays things straight when he is in that headless form. When we see Walken with those teeth hissing like a wildcat it is comically bad and undercuts any real fear we had for him. Compare his final scene with the one earlier at the church when he’s there to claim the head of Baltus and you’ll see the Horseman should have remained headless.
This film scared up a decent profit when it released in the fall of 1999. Twenty-five years later it is still a good atmospheric Halloween movie, tame by today’s gore standards but not without its scares. The effects haven’t aged well and the decision to give the Horseman a back story as well as show his face comes close to sinking it, but the performances by Johnny Depp and Christina Ricci ground it in a way few Tim Burton films have. Add to that the wonderful ensemble of townsfolk who sell their fear, as well as the seedy underbelly of the town itself, and you have a good film to watch during the fall season. It’s unlikely to scare anyone but the youngest of kids watching but it doesn’t need to be legitimately scary. It has atmosphere aplenty and is overall a rollicking good time.
Release Date: November 19, 1999
Running Time: 106 Minutes
Rated R
Starring: Johnny Depp, Christina Ricci, Miranda Richardson, Michael Gambon, Casper Van Dien and Jeffrey Jones
Directed By: Tim Burton
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