Directed by Tim Burton
Starring Johnny Depp, Christina Ricci, Michael Gambon, Miranda Richardson, Marc Pickering, Jeffery Jones, Richard Griffiths, Michael Gough, Ian McDiarmid, Christopher Walken, Ray Park, Casper Van Dien, Lisa Marie
R for graphic horror violence and gore, and for a scene of sexuality.
SCAREmeter: 6.5/10
GOREmeter: 10/10
OVERALL: 2.5 out of 4 stars
Through the 1990s, legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola set about producing major Hollywood productions of iconic horror stories through his company American Zoetrope. After Coppola's own directed feature DRACULA (1992) and Shakespeare aficionado Kenneth Branaugh's FRANKENSTEIN (1994), the third, final and biggest of these grandly-scaled horror productions was Tim Burton's SLEEPY HOLLOW, based on The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving.
Elaborating on the fairly simple short story, Ichabod Crane (Johnny Depp) is an New York City constable at the turning of a new century in the year 1799. Awkward Ichabod is constantly frustrated by the indifference of his fellow law officers toward crime scene forensics, and when his indignant protests become more belligerent, he is sent to the rural farming community of Sleepy Hollow in upstate New York, where three connected slayings have occurred, all involving decapitation. Ichabod's scientific methods are countered by the superstitions of the Sleepy Hollow townsfolk, led by a town council of the wealthy land baron Baltus Van Tassel (Michael Gambon), Magistrate Philipse (Richard Griffiths), Reverend Steenwyck (Jeffery Jones), Dr. Lancaster (Ian McDiarmid), and Notary Hardenbrook (Michael Gough). The identity of the killer is well understood by the townspeople to be the Headless Horseman (Christopher Walken in flashback, stuntman Ray Park when shown headless), a Hessian mercenary who fought on the side of the British in the American Revolutionary War, not for money but for bloodlust, with a flair for beheading his opponents. Eventually cornered and beheaded himself, the Horseman was buried in the nearby woods, and now returns for vengeance at nights, severing and taking away the heads of his victims. Naturally, Ichabod is dismissive, and proceeds to inspect the headless bodies, whilst also romancing Van Tassel's daughter, Katrina (Christina Ricci). Eventually, Ichabod is forced to face the reality of the Headless Horseman, after witnessing him personally, but it turns out that the Horseman does not act of his own accord, but is raised from Hell by the living person who has taken the Horseman's skull from his unmarked grave, and is marking victims for him in the process of an elaborate conspiracy.
It is unmistakably a Tim Burton film; it was a return to success for the most popular filmmaker of the decade after the second half of the 1990s had seen him turn low budget and then increasingly-larger budgeted films into blockbuster smash hits like BEETLE JUICE (1988) and BATMAN (1989), but has seen a downward slide with the critically-lauded but financially unsuccessful ED WOOD (1994) and the big budget box office bomb MARS ATTACKS! (1996). The 1990s were an awesome decade when R-rated movies could be produced on large budgets to become major successes like TERMINATOR 2: JUDGEMENT DAY (1991), DIE HARD: WITH A VENGEANCE (1995) and SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (1998). SLEEPY HOLLOW, a hard-R if there ever was one, was budgeted at $100 million (by comparison, the #1 movie of 1999, the visual effects-laden STAR WARS EPISODE I, cost $115 million), and became Burton's highest-grossing movie at the time with over $200 million worldwide. It was the third collaboration between Johnny Depp and Burton, following their first film together, EDWARD SCISSORHANDS (1992) and ED WOOD (the count is now at eight films for the director-actor team), and Depp's only film to gross $100 million prior to his iconic performance as Jack Sparrow in Disney's PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN film series.
Depp, a notoriously extreme actor whose character input can often turn far too bizarre without the proper tempering from collaborators, had the notion of wearing cartoonish prosthetics for his hears and nose to better match Washington Irving's descriptions in the original story, which is certainly an interesting idea, but probably for the best that Paramount's executives turned his idea down. Instead, Depp maintains his age-defying boyish good looks, whilst also playing Constable Crane with a capable but jittery sort of comic action hero flair. Burton's lead, Christina Ricci as Katrina Van Tassel, however, feels miscast, despite her best efforts. Her otherworldly look and demeanor do not match the countryside beauty queen that the character is supposed to be, and her chemistry with Depp is weak. Poor Casper Van Dien, the would-be romantic rival as Bram Van Brunt, is barely a cameo, never properly established and little more than an afterthought whose gruesome death is quickly brushed over to provide new elements to the mystery of the Horseman's motivations. Otherwise, the cast is very strong, filled out with veteran actors, including Hammer Horror legends (the film pays homage to the iconic British film studio) Michael Gough as Notary Hardenbrook and Christopher Lee in a brief cameo as the Burgomaster who assigns Crane to Sleepy Hollow. Michael Gambon is excellent as Baltus Van Tassel, and previous Burton collaborators make appearances in minor roles, including Martin Landau (who won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in ED WOOD) in a cameo in the prologue scene and Christopher Walken, who gives one of his most eccentric performances as the Hessian Horseman prior to losing and after regaining his head (Ray Park, best known as Darth Maul from STAR WARS EPISODE I, plays the Horseman in his headless scenes).
Burton, a self-professed fan of Hammer Studios' horror films, pays homage to them throughout the film, filming it as storybook-stylized Gothic horror on sound stages. creating a marvelously heightened sense of reality, with forest sets blanketed in low ominous fog, and very specific imagery. The film also pays homage to the classic Legend of Sleepy Hollow animated segment of the 1949 Disney film THE ADVENTURES OF ICHABOD AND MR. TOAD. Burton began his filmmaking career as an animator at Walt Disney Studios in the early 1980s, where he had been fired after using company resources to make short films, the animated VINCENT (1982) and the live-action FRANKENWEENIE (1984), which the studio decided were too dark to be made use of (both can now be found on the bonus features of TIM BURTON'S THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS on Blu-Ray and DVD), but he had been intrigued by some of the materials from the animated segment he saw during his time there. In a scene where Ichabod is riding his horse through the hollow at night, a frog is heard mimicking those from the Disney film, croaking "Ich-a-bod, Ich-a-bod," before shown leaping into the pond, and the Headless Horseman (actually Bram pulling a prank), reminiscent of the Horseman from the cartoon, chases Ichabod on horseback across the covered bridge before hurling a flaming jack-o-lantern at his head.Although Burton has directed action films, including BATMAN and BATMAN RETURNS (1992), he's never had much of a knack for action, being far more adept at establishing atmosphere than much else, but SLEEPY HOLLOW probably has the best action scenes of any of his movies. With the full-reign of an R rating available to him, SLEEPY HOLLOW is arguably Burton's goriest movie (a strong argument could be made for SWEENEY TODD, although that's far more bloody than gory). Ironically though, it rarely feels so explicit, partially because of the heightened sense of reality and also because it's at such an extreme level that it comes off as matter-of-factual, rather than stomach-churning, except for in a couple of very deliberate gross-out moments. Having counted myself, there are a total of 18 decapitations, or rather, 18 persons decapitated throughout the film:
- BEHEADINGS SHOWN ONSCREEN (HEAD-SEVERING VISIBLE): 11
- BEHEADINGS PARTIALLY OFFSCREEN (HEAD-SEVERING HIDDEN OR OBSCURED, BUT BLOOD SPLATTER AND/OR ROLLING HEAD VISIBLE): 2
- BEHEADINGS OUT OF FRAME (HEAD SEVERING COMPLETELY UNSHOWN, BUT TAKING PLACE WITHIN SCENE, SEVERED HEAD SHOWN): 3, plus 1 repetition of the Horseman's severed head being dropped in a grave.
- BEHEADINGS ONLY MENTIONED OF, BUT REMAINS VISIBLE ONSCREEN OUT OF ACTION CONTEXT: 1
- BEHEADINGS ONLY MENTIONED OF, NO RESULTS SHOWN ONSCREEN: 1 (involving a pregnant woman's headless body, with a stab wound in the stomach (stab wound shown), to behead the unborn child (nice)).
Nobody could accuse the film of being shy about the gory details, as it most often revels in them, with plenty of gruesome headless bodies with open necks in open view, all the muscle, bone and arterial details in full view, and an autopsy where bright red blood squirts like a jet comically into Ichabod's eye. It's all usually on a rather stylized level though, and one aspect that is characteristic of depictions of violence in Burton's movies which I love is that the blood is of a Hammer Horror sort, like fluorescent red paint, and there's lots of it. My personal favorite "kill" in the film is that of Richard Griffiths' character, in which the head spins for a moment atop the neck before toppling off.
It's an amusing enough, perfectly atmospheric film, with the finest assortment of decapitations of any film that I can think of, but it's a very in the moment film, the sort that dissipates from the mind soon, and weakens on repeat viewings, but entertainment value it has.
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