Sleepy Hollow @ 25: Tim Burton's last great movie

by Cláudio Alves

When Beetlejuice Beetlejuice celebrated its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, many critics rejoiced, eager to announce Tim Burton's return to form. But were such proclamations accurate? While the ghost story sequel had its merits, besting many of the director's more recent efforts, it still felt lacking compared to his early triumphs, that dream run from the mid-80s to the late-90s. I'd go so far as saying that Burton's last truly great movie arrived at the end of the last millennium, when he re-imagined the Legend of the Headless Horseman and delivered a spooky season classic that feels like Fall vibes distilled into filmic form. That very picture celebrates the quarter-century mark today, so it should be an excellent time to revisit it. Dear reader, pack up your things and join me on a journey to Sleepy Hollow…

The prologue to Sleepy Hollow is the perfect tone-setting set piece, mixing the signifiers, techniques and fundamental idioms of classic horror with a nasty bit of slapstick sensibility. A well-dressed fellow who we'll later know to be Peter Van Garrett, the community leader and richest man in town, has had some documents signed and is returning home in the shadow of night. Red wax drips over yellowed paper like thick blood, and the sky itself seems like a velvet sheath spotted with silver thread. The material reality of 18th-century New York has been twisted into a Halloween nightmare stylized to picture-book glory, utterly unafraid to skirt credulity in the name of spectacle. 

But Van Garrett is afraid, his terror performed beautifully by a cameo-ing Martin Landau. Someone or something is after him, a horse galloping in the distance but coming closer by the second. Fog swirls and the soundtrack strings screech when the sound of a swinging blade cuts through flesh, bone, and the thick atmosphere. Between genuine horror and a macabre joke, the carriage driver is shown freshly decapitated, prompting the old man to run for his life. He goes into the fields nearby, but there's no escape. Gilding the lily in a most shameless fashion, Burton punctuates the man's demise by splattering arterial spray onto an all-watching scarecrow with an evil-looking pumpkin for a head.

It's glorious, marrying scares with silliness, the Platonic ideal of spooky cinema contained in a few minutes. After that opening, it's off to New York City, where the scenery is just as exquisitely realized, though less laden with the flavor of Halloween delight. There, Tim Burton's camera finds his all-time favorite leading man in the role of police constable Ichabod Crane. Johnny Depp plays him as a man of science and justice, intent on spreading the gospel of modernity, yet plagued by a cowardly disposition. There's also a lot of unnecessary backstory and familial trauma, which only exists to bring the director's then-girlfriend and muse, Lisa Marie, into the film as Crane's witchy mother.

But such details will only come into the story later, in flashbacks so beautifully shot that one might be willing to excuse their narrative dysfunction. Emmanuel Lubezki lensed Sleepy Hollow and earned the hell out of his second Oscar nomination, playing with old-school technique without turning the movie into pastiche. Initially, Burton had discussed the possibility of shooting the film in Academy Ratio and black-and-white to more obviously honor his classic horror inspirations, but Lubezki's final approach manages to nod in those directions while avoiding literalism, draining color and warmth from his frames while exulting the depths of black through photochemical wizardry, sculpting shadows with light while softening faces and places with smoke.

There's naught a shred of realism in the lensing, and Sleepy Hollow is all the better for it. When Ichabod is sent to investigate a series of murders in the titular town by Christopher Lee – framed with black wings, an angel of death in judge's costume – the film presents one of its only trek through location shooting, real woods rather than the Oscar-winning ones Rick Heinrichs built inside sound stages. But even then, there's that intrusion of machine-made fog and bright light shafts through the thick air. When the easily frightened hero finally arrives at Sleepy Hollow, the camera finds another miraculous union of set design and Lubezki's magic touch. The entire hamlet built from scratch, the sort of big budget physical cinema craft we never see nowadays.

From then on, Burton and company have fun re-staging the tall tale of Sleepy Hollow as a police procedural halfway between a Christie whodunnit and a pre-CSI forensic farce. The town is home to a cadre of character actors doing their best to match the movie's odd tonalities. Richard Griffiths is in attendance, holding on to an ankh for dear life, while Ian McDiarmid is doing his usual shady shtick to great effect, and Michael Gambon delivers Andrew Kevin Walker's purplish writing as if it were the Bard's work. And then there's Cristina Ricci and Miranda Richardson as Katrina Anne Van Tassel and her stepmother, Lady Mary. The former is a golden-haired porcelain doll, one of Burton's big-eyed drawings made flesh with all the moody mystery to match.

The latter is Sleepy Hollow's MVP, the center of its mystery and, as the third act reveals, the story's biggest monster. Back when I was little, just starting to discover the world of actressing, I remember feeling besotted by Richardson's hammy villainy, her grand monologue, and just how much she seemed to savor each line and dastardly deed. It's thanks to Sleepy Hollow that I went on to seek other Richardson movies – Enchanted April, Damage, Spider, Tom & Viv, and so many others – falling further in love with a performer I never felt got her dues. However, I should clarify that not all my affection was born from her acting. A great deal came from admiring the striking design of her character(s), bedecked in Colleen Atwood's 18th-century creations.

Ricci's wardrobe comprises the movie's most iconic fits, and it's easy to see why so many have fallen in love with Katrina's style, mixing historical silhouettes with sophisticated witchery, a kiss of romanticism, pattern over pattern over pattern. The black and white marvel she dons for Sleepy Hollow's last scene is one of the 1990s most memorable movie costumes. It's even more admirable when you discover the greenish reflections of its stripes came to be because every line was colored in with markers. But for all the frock's fabulousness, it can't compare to Richardson's grand dame fits, a multi-part masterclass on how one can suggest the specific past while twisting it just a little bit into the realm of fantasy.

Consider the snail spirals drawn dark over her first gown. Or her cobweb-y decay as the mystical crone in the woods. Better yet, think back to Lady Van Tassle's climatic dress, a curious web of thick black velvet over white, pulling from centuries before the main action as if to suggest a magic tradition that goes further into history than the tale of Sleepy Hollow and its headless killer. Speaking of the horseman, he's played by Christopher Walken – plus a team of stuntmen – and dressed in another Atwood masterpiece, all devilish motif and haptic details. He looks otherworldly yet palpable, something from another hellish dimension that we can still imagine touching with our mortal hands.

The character and costume's proper introduction happens during a flashback, awfully reminiscent of Coppola's Dracula, which would make for a great double-feature companion to Sleepy Hollow. Both are celebrations of anachronistic film technique, giving new life to scary stories so old and so often told that they have become part of the collective imagination. Both are also some of its directors' best films, despite what some might say about the Bram Stoker adaptation. Though, while the Hollywood scion and winemaker (who executive produced Sleepy Hollow) re-interpreted Dracula with a surge of romance across time, Burton prefers to ponder the clash of the magical and the modern, the impossible and the rational.

Thematic backbone that may be, it's also teetering on the verge of too much for a thin narrative whose general lack of substance is more boon than curse. Sleepy Hollow is at its best when it's inviting the audience to bask in the atmosphere, the mood, and bewitchingly realized spookiness of sight and sound. Who cares for story in the face of such splendor? Burton realizes this to some degree, which is why the piece's tone is so self-aware, so tapped into an essential madness that stops short of self-seriousness. It's always better to laugh and be entertained than to be mired in great ideas, at least when the program is the best Halloween movie of its era – no matter the November release date. I know I always have a grand old time whenever I revisit Sleepy Hollow. Do you?

Sleepy Hollow is streaming on Paramount Plus. You can also rent it from Apple TV, Amazon, the Microsoft Store, and Spectrum On Demand.