This
is my favorite time of year, second only to Christmas. Autumn has
arrived, the weather is cooling down, and October becomes the month-long
celebration of scary movies called Shocktober. There are a lot of
horror movies out there, but as a genre, horror is still looked down
upon by some mainstream critics and moviegoers. It doesn’t help that,
admittedly, there are so few quality horror movies made but, like
comedy, it’s a very difficult and subjective genre. So, in the days
leading up Halloween I’ll be posting some recommendations for scary
movies to help you celebrate Shocktober.
Night 3: "Watch your heads." Sleepy Hollow
The 1999 film of Sleepy Hollow is very loosely based on the
famous Washington Irving story, but this big budget adaptation directed by Tim Burton succeeds where so many re-imaginings/reboots/re-whatevers fail. Burton
brings more than enough style and substance to make what would otherwise be a
bloated, bloody mess of a classic story something exciting and
engaging.
Johnny Depp plays Ichabod Crane who, in this version, is a New
York City constable in the year 1799 sent to the small town of Sleepy Hollow to
investigate a series of beheadings. He is a strong believer in science and
reason and using methods of detection to solve crimes, methods that are new and
not taken seriously. Crane is welcomed by few and unwelcomed by most in the town. The town elders tell Crane the legend of the ghoulish Headless Horseman -- a
story that scares Crane enough to make his hands tremble -- but he rejects the story
and resolves to find the logical explanation for the beheadings. This is what
makes the new story of Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman engaging, it is
not just a horror story, but also a murder mystery.
The mood and atmosphere of this movie is as thick as the fog
in the town of Sleepy Hollow. This movie won an Academy Award for its art
direction which is wonderfully gothic, with its dreary skies, abundant fog, muted colors,
and period architecture. This has to be one of the heaviest atmospheres of any Tim Burton
movie. Burton has said that the inspiration for this movie was, in part, the
movies of Hammer Films, which if you’ve seen a Hammer horror movie is easy to
observe. Hammer film veteran Christopher Lee even makes a cameo at the
beginning of the movie.
Sleepy Hollow is heavy on gore and violence. When those
heads come off, the blood flows and flows. Unlike most horror movies,
however, the gore in Sleepy Hollow is not the focus of the film and is not mean
spirited. You never root for a beheading or dismemberment in this movie. There
are CGI effects used in certain scenes that hold up surprisingly well. The
third act of the movie is essentially just a big action sequence, which somewhat overshadows the revelations that resolved the central mystery. However, despite that
action climax, the overall conclusion of the movie is still satisfying.
I wouldn’t call Sleepy Hollow scary, but it is still a fun movie to
watch, even for people that are skittish of horror films.
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