Although the opening titles of
Sleepy Hollow do credit Washington Irving as the
author of the short story on which the film is based, the
producers would have done better to have prefaced the film
with the caveat: "Any similarity between this photoplay
and Washington Irving's 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow' is
purely coincidental." It's a little as if someone had
set out to make a film version of Little Women and ended up
with Dracula. Irving's whimsical tale told of a
practical joke played by some young men in a village in the
Hudson Valley on the stiff necked New England schoolmaster
Ichabod Crane, who riding home one night believes himself
pursued by the ghost of a headless Hessian mercenary from the
days of the Revolution and flees to never be seen again. But Sleepy
Hollow's director, Tim Burton, and his
screenwriters--Kevin Yagher and Andrew Kevin Walker--turn
this scenario completely upside down, making the headless
horseman a quite real revenant, responsible for committing a
series of grisly murders. In effect, the movie sets out to
play the same trick on the audience that the village youths
played on the hapless Ichabod. But in Burton's Sleepy
Hollow, Ichabod (Johnny Depp) is no longer a figure of
fun but a high-minded exponent of forensic medicine and
prison reform, a constable who is sent in 1799 to investigate
the mysterious happenings upstate and to apprehend the
criminal. And his trip to the village becomes a trip back in
time, to a world of magic spells and diabolic rites. This
Sleepy Hollow, which bears a more than passing resemblance to
Hans Poelzig's sets for the Prague ghetto in Carl Boese and
Paul Wegener's The Golem (1920), is no quaint locale
but a New York cousin to one of those godforsaken New England
settlements depicted by H.P. Lovecraft, whose inhabitants
have long ago forsaken farming for necromancy.
As such I have no quarrel with
the liberties Burton and his collaborators have taken with
their source. After all Washington Irving is not Herman
Melville, and the violence they do to Irving's story is
nearly innocuous compared with the atrocities perpetrated by
cinematic adaptations of some of the most important novels of
Jane Austen or Henry James. Unfortunately, in departing
from the original story Sleepy Hollow's creators are
forced to resort to plot contrivances that would make the
most hardened Gothic romancer blush as well as
introducing--piling Pelion on Ossa--a subplot about Ichabod's
mother, tortured to death by his sadistic father, a religious
fanatic who suspected her of practicing witchcraft--an
innovation that serves in turn as the pretext for some
insufferably kitschy subjective flashbacks. Nor are matters helped by generally
lackluster performances, in spite of the participation of
some gifted actors. I have never been a fan of Johnny Depp's
but I can't find too much to complain about in his turn as
Ichabod, although he looks much more as if he would be at
home in the Viper Club than Sleepy Hollow. Christina Ricci,
however, whom I liked quite a bit in John Waters' Pecker,
is disastrously miscast as Katrina Van Tassel. It is some
comment on the casting that the brief appearance of
Christopher Lee, in a minor role, is far more dramatically
effective than any of the performances elsewhere in Sleepy
Hollow.
Nevertheless, for anyone who
is a pushover for horror films (I am), Sleepy Hollow
is well worth watching. In its best moments, such as the opening
sequence of the pursuit by the horseman, or the scene of
Ichabod's arrival in the village, Sleepy Hollow, with its
elegantly tinted cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki, manages
to conjure up the atmosphere of a bona fide horror film. The horror film genre, which
interestingly dates back to quite an early point in the
history of the cinema, has always had its ups and downs,
doubtless having reached its peaks in the German films of the
early 1920's and the American sound films in the first half
of the 1930's; with rare exceptions like Georges Franju's Eyes
without a Face (1960), many later examples of the genre
come across as grotesque, sickly imitations of their
predecessors--like the offspring of one of Lovecraft's
degenerate families--where they do not fall back upon grossly
physical effects. But in these latter days the horror film
has become a real genre maudit, seemingly
degraded to an endlessly recycled series of slasher schlock
pix, and Burton shrewdly throws in enough blood, gore, and
creepy-crawly stuff to satisfy the most seasoned adolescent
viewer. (The film's "R" rating notwithstanding, the
picture is obviously targeted primarily at a teen-age male
audience.) Still, great horror on celluloid was always a
matter of atmosphere, not decapitations and evisceration, and
in Sleepy Hollow's best moments, like the ones
mentioned above, Burton succeeds in tapping into this
tradition. But even if he introduces visual allusions to Carl
Dreyer's Vampyr and the James Whale Frankenstein
into a climactic windmill scene, he seems less to be looking
back at the classics of the genre than to less distinguished
if still distinctive works from the later 1950's and
1960's--for example, the Hammer Film productions in which
Christopher Lee made his reputation as well as somewhat later
Italian films like Mario Bava's Black Sunday (La
Maschera del Demonio; 1960) or Ricardo Freda's The
Horrible Dr. Hitchcock (Raptus; 1962). In fact, in
remarks quoted on the Web site for the film, Burton himself
acknowledges the influence of the Hammer pictures on Sleepy
Hollow. (Although Sleepy Hollow itself has, sadly,
nearly vanished from theaters by now, the well-designed site,
which is well worth a look, is still up.) These were all
films which often had striking moments of visual stylization,
stronger on atmosphere than performances or dramatic
plausibility, and Sleepy Hollow is no unworthy pendant
to them.