8 / 10
A Constable of Science
It’s 1799, and Ichabod Crane is a New York constable who believes the police should solve crimes with evidence and reason, instead of torture and confessions. His superiors find him insufferable, so they send him upstate to the Hudson Valley village of Sleepy Hollow, where three people have been found with their heads cut off. Solve that, they tell him, with all your precious science.
The villagers tell him the killer is a ghost: a Hessian mercenary, beheaded during the Revolutionary War, who rides out of the Western Woods at night to take heads. Ichabod doesn’t believe a word of it. Then he sees the Horseman with his own eyes, in the middle of the night, and faints dead away.
Tim Burton made it in 1999, from a script by Andrew Kevin Walker, who’d written Se7en. Burton never made a more purely beautiful film. Washington Irving’s 1820 story is a gentle, comic tale about a nervous schoolteacher. Burton turned it into a blood-soaked Gothic murder mystery, and it works.
Depp’s Ichabod
Johnny Depp plays Ichabod as a delicate, jittery man of reason who’s terrified of almost everything: spiders, blood, the dark and the thought that ghosts might be real. He carries a case full of strange homemade instruments, faints at the worst possible moments and screams like a child when things go wrong. His gadgets, a pair of multi-lensed spectacles, a set of surgical tools and a bag of powders, are wonderfully Burtonesque, half science and half toy box, and he uses them with a showman’s pride even when they don’t work.
It’s a funny, oddly brave performance, playing the hero as a coward with a good brain. Depp was deep in his Burton phase, after Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wood, and he makes Ichabod’s cowardice endearing. When he finally does something brave, it means something, because we’ve seen how scared he is.
The film gives him a backstory, too: flashbacks to his childhood, and his mother, a gentle woman accused of witchcraft by his fanatical father. It explains his faith in reason and his fear of the supernatural, and it lends the film an unexpected sadness. Lisa Marie plays the mother in dreamlike flashbacks, and those scenes, full of spinning toys and sudden horror, haunt the rest of the film.
For Writers
Ichabod is a coward with a brilliant mind, afraid of spiders, the dark and the sight of blood. His fear makes his eventual courage mean something.
A hero who’s frightened is often more interesting than one who’s fearless. The reader can measure every brave act against the fear it took to overcome, and the courage feels properly earned.
Burton plays Ichabod’s fear for laughs, and then, when it matters, lets him act despite it. The comedy makes the courage stronger, because the audience knows exactly how much it costs him to stand his ground. A fearless hero risks nothing inside. A frightened one risks everything every time he moves forward.
The Village
Sleepy Hollow is a tight little Dutch community run by a handful of powerful elders: the wealthy Baltus Van Tassel, played by Michael Gambon, the stern Reverend Steenwyck, played by Jeffrey Jones, a shifty notary played by Michael Gough and a doctor and magistrate with plenty to hide. Christopher Lee turns up at the start as the New York burgomaster who sends Ichabod away.
The elders welcome Ichabod with forced smiles and dark looks, and every one of them has secrets, and as the Horseman keeps killing, it becomes clear that his victims aren’t random. Somebody is controlling him, pointing him at the people who know too much. The mystery is who, and why, and it leads back through wills, land deeds and old grudges.
The Horseman
Christopher Walken plays the Hessian Horseman in flashbacks, before he lost his head, and he’s terrifying: a snarling, wild-haired killer with teeth filed to points, riding a huge black horse and swinging a sword with savage glee. Walken barely speaks. He doesn’t need to. The hissing and the grin do all the work.
After he loses his head, the Horseman is played mostly by a stuntman with a special costume, and the effect is eerie. A headless rider galloping through fog, swinging his blade, is still one of the best monsters of the nineties. The beheadings are frequent, sudden and bloody, with heads flying off in all directions, and Burton stages them with a grim, almost comic relish.
The Tree of the Dead
The film’s most famous image is the Tree of the Dead, a huge, twisted, gnarled tree in the Western Woods that marks the Horseman’s grave and his gateway between the worlds. When Ichabod cuts into it, blood pours out. Inside its hollow trunk, he finds the stolen heads of the Horseman’s victims.
It’s pure fairy-tale horror, and the whole look of the film grows from it. Burton and his production designer, Rick Heinrichs, built a whole world around it: a village of grey timber houses, a forest of dead trees, a covered bridge and a windmill, all bathed in fog and drained of color.
For Writers
The Tree of the Dead, bleeding and stuffed with severed heads, sums up the film’s fairy-tale horror in a single image.
A single, powerful central image can define a story’s world and tone. Readers remember a striking image long after they’ve forgotten the plot, and it can anchor everything around it, from the setting to the theme.
Look for the one image that captures your story’s mood and meaning, and build toward it. Place it at a moment of revelation, where it can carry the weight of the story’s secrets. Burton puts the stolen heads inside the tree, so the image and the answer arrive together, and neither can be forgotten.
Grey, Fog and Blood
Few horror films have ever looked this beautiful. Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography drains almost all the color from the image, leaving greys, blacks and silvers, so that the only strong color is the red of blood when it spurts. The effect is like a Victorian engraving come to life.
The film won the Oscar for art direction, and it deserved it. The village, the woods and the Van Tassel mansion look like they were built for a gorgeous nightmare. Danny Elfman’s score, all choirs and churning strings, fits perfectly. You could watch it with the sound off and still be enthralled.
Katrina
Christina Ricci plays Katrina Van Tassel, the daughter of the richest man in the village, who’s interested in witchcraft and in Ichabod. She’s pale, wide-eyed and mysterious, and for much of the film the audience is invited to suspect her. Ricci is well cast, though the character is a little thin, more a Gothic image than a person.
Casper Van Dien plays Brom Van Brunt, the village bully who loves Katrina, in a role borrowed from Irving’s original story. He’s a big, handsome brute, and he gets one of the film’s best fights, with the Horseman, in a covered bridge.
The Solution
The mystery’s solution, when it comes, is a little convoluted. Miranda Richardson plays Lady Van Tassel, Katrina’s stepmother, and she turns out to be the villain: a witch controlling the Horseman, with a long history of revenge and a twin sister thrown in for good measure. Richardson clearly enjoys the big reveal, cackling and scheming, and she makes a vivid villain.
But the explanation, involving family land, a secret past and a string of murders, is complicated enough to confuse. It arrives in one long speech that’s hard to follow. Burton’s films have never been strong on plot, and this one is no exception. You watch Sleepy Hollow for the fog, the woods and the Horseman, and you forgive the explanation because everything around it is so good to look at.
For Writers
The mystery’s solution is delivered in one long, convoluted speech, and it’s hard to follow. The atmosphere carries the film, and the plot limps along behind it.
A mystery’s solution should be clear and satisfying. If it takes a long speech to explain, the reader may lose track halfway through, and the payoff loses its power.
Plant the clues throughout the story, so that when the answer comes, the reader can put it together quickly. The best solutions feel obvious in hindsight and need only a line or two to deliver. If you find yourself writing a long explanation, the clues weren’t planted well enough, and the fix belongs earlier in the book. For more, see my article on foreshadowing.
Hammer’s Ghost
Burton grew up on the Gothic horror films of Britain’s Hammer studio, and Sleepy Hollow is his love letter to them. Casting Christopher Lee, Hammer’s great Dracula, as the burgomaster is a deliberate nod. So are the misty forests, the candlelit interiors, the heaving bosoms and the gleeful, theatrical gore.
Michael Gough, who appeared in several Hammer films and played Alfred in Burton’s Batman, is here too. The whole film feels like a lavish, big-budget version of a sixties Hammer picture, made by someone who loved them and wanted to see them done with Hollywood money.
The Windmill
The climax at a burning windmill is another nod to classic horror, echoing the finale of the 1931 Frankenstein. Ichabod, Katrina and young Masbath, the orphan boy who becomes Ichabod’s assistant, are trapped inside while the Horseman hacks his way in, and the whole thing goes up in flames.
It’s followed by a wild chase through the woods by coach, with the Horseman in pursuit, and a showdown at the Tree of the Dead. The action is exciting and gloriously over the top, and it gives Depp’s cowardly hero the chance to be brave at last.
Mood Over Mystery
Sleepy Hollow is a film to be enjoyed for its atmosphere more than its story. The mystery is creaky, the romance is thin and Depp’s comic cowardice sometimes undercuts the tension. The gore will put some viewers off, and the film makes no apology for it.
But the images are unforgettable, the Horseman is a terrific monster and the whole thing has a grisly, playful energy that’s hard to resist. It’s the Hammer horror film Burton always wanted to make, and a fine one.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Sleepy Hollow builds its world through atmosphere: fog, grey light, twisted trees and sudden red blood. The mood is so strong that it carries a creaky mystery.
Atmosphere can sustain a story through weaker plotting, but it can’t replace a clear solution.
Invest in the mood of your setting, and make sure your plot’s answers are as clear as your imagery is rich.
A Nightmare in Grey
Sleepy Hollow is an 8: a gorgeous, gory Gothic horror film with Johnny Depp’s comically squeamish Ichabod, Christopher Walken’s snarling Horseman and some of the most beautiful images of Burton’s career. The mystery is creaky, and the fog and blood make it a treat.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on one of my film lists