Sleepy Hollow
With Johnny Depp, Christina Ricci, Miranda Richardson, Michael Gambon, Casper Van Dien, Jeffrey Jones, and Christopher Walken.
Admittedly, there’s an Ichabod Crane in Burton’s movie–though here he’s a New York detective (Johnny Depp), not a local schoolteacher and choirmaster–and a farmer’s daughter named Katrina Van Tassel (Christina Ricci) who takes a shine to him, and a burly horseman who competes for her favor called Brom Van Brunt (Casper Van Dien). The period and the town are roughly the same, and Ichabod gets menaced by a headless horseman. But after that the resemblances cease. In fact, the two stories are for the most part based on opposite premises. It’s clear in the Irving story, though the narrator remains coy about it, that the headless horseman is Brom in disguise, and he so badly scares the impressionable Ichabod when he’s on his way home from a party at the Von Tassels’ that he disappears from town, allowing Brom to marry Katrina. But in Burton’s version there really is a headless horseman (an uncredited Christopher Walken) who’s already beheaded several locals (including Martin Landau in a precredits sequence), not to mention a trite flashback out of a Hammer horror movie of the 50s or 60s about What Made Him That Way. (The screenwriter is Andrew Kevin Walker, who wrote the contemporary serial-killer movie Seven and, more recently, Fight Club; the screen story is credited to Walker and Kevin Yagher, a makeup artist and special-effects expert who’s also done some direction on TV’s Tales From the Crypt.)
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There’s something undeniably touching about such unreasonable passion and devotion, and I suppose some of the same sort of piety can be found in Sleepy Hollow. All these movies have the fervent fanaticism of a cult taste projected into the mainstream with affection as well as confidence. Yet here Burton’s fidelity is exclusively to the period feeling he gets from disreputable Hammer horror films (which entails some relation to the period of Hammer’s literary sources–Frankenstein was published the same year “Rip Van Winkle” was written) and a few images culled from Ichabod and Mr. Toad. When it comes to one of America’s great stories, Burton obviously couldn’t care less.
