Sleepy Hollow

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, 1949. Directed by Clyde Geronimi and Jack Kinney. Bing Crosby.

Synopsis: Ichabod Crane, the new schoolmaster in Sleepy Hollow is smitten with the Katrina Von Tassel, the daughter of the township’s wealthiest farmer. This doesn’t endear him to the locals, particularly Brom Bones, who has an eye for Katrina himself. But the women of Sleepy Hollow are charmed by Crane, so Bones has to stew in his resentment, until the Halloween dance. Brom has carefully observed the schoolmaster, and realizes that he has a superstitious streak a mile wide. Brom brings down the house with his tale of the legendary Headless Horseman, said to haunt the road to Sleepy Hollow, collecting the heads of unwary travelers unless they can cross the covered bridge, where his power ends. Crane eats it up, but laughs it off as a good natured story. On his ride home, however, the tale isn’t so easy to dismiss, can Ichabod cross the bridge before the Headless Horseman takes his head? Is the Headless Horseman real?

There are a lot of film versions of Washington Irving’s evil fairy tale, including Tim Burton’s recent "re-imagining" with Johnny Depp as Ichabod Crane, but none of them come close to the somber, Halloween feeling of Disney’s animated version. Originally paired with the studio’s rendition of The Wind in the Willows (with which it is currently available on DVD), this film became a holiday staple of Disney’s long-running Wonderful World of Disney television show, where entire generations of viewers first saw it. I suspect that more people have seen this movie than any other horror movie. And it IS a horror movie, one of the best horror movies, one whose entire reason for existence is to scare the living daylights out of the viewer. That the principle audience for this film is children is immaterial, and I daresay that as many adults have enjoyed being thrilled by this film as have their children.

The film’s construction is particularly cunning. The film is divided into three distinct parts: the prelude, in which we meet Ichabod and the other citizens of Sleepy Hollow, the Halloween dance, and Ichabod’s fateful ride home. All three movements have a different feel: The movie begins as a nostalgic reminiscence of New England’s rural past, rendered in a resplendent palette of autumnal colors. At the end of the 1940s, Disney was entering the sunset of their classic period, but the artistry lavished on their animated products was still near the peak of the art of hand-drawn animation. If there is a more attractively mounted horror film from the 1940s, I can’t think of it. The first third of the film looks like it could have stepped whole and breathing off a Currier and Ives calendar.

The Halloween dance has a different feel: there’s an air of the good-natured aspects Halloween in this segment, the Halloween of bobbing for apples and telling ghost stories. Certainly, Brom Bones’s song, "You Can’t Reason With a Headless Man," is good fun; it’s ominous and funny and raucous, the ideal song for Halloween short of the advent of Rock and Roll. The look of this section is still autumnal, the dominant colors are earth tones and oranges, but the oranges are beginning to edge into a more sinister symbolism, there is a hint of the diabolical during Brom Bones’s song, and the orange of autumn fades into the orange of the infernal.

The last act of the film abandons the colors of autumn for the colors of night. The dominant colors in this part of the film are black, midnight blue, and purple. There are still orange highlights, but they are associated with the Headless Horseman and are NOT suggestive of autumn, but of the demonic. The last third of the movie is one of the most carefully constructed suspense sequences in horror movies. After the movement and sound of the dance segment, the first part of Ichabod’s ride is quiet and solemn. The animators have created a setting for this part of the film that positively drips with menace, a place that captures the loneliness of a night ride home perfectly. The sound design of this segment builds on the visuals, and as Ichabod jumps at every small sound, so does the audience. The small details here are wonderful: the fireflies that are the "eyes" of a hollow tree, the "ichabod" murmur of the frogs, the drumming of the cattails. By the time The Headless Horseman makes his appearance, the audience is already on the edge of its seat. The filmmakers are particularly canny in this sequence: they cut it with small bits of humor and slapstick, centered specifically around Crane and his cowardly horse. The Headless Horseman himself is a spectacular creation, and reveals some of the true power of animation: there is no zipper running up the back of the monster, no matte line around his missing head. No exaggerated height to the torso where the costume department has hidden an actor’s head. This sequence has a freedom of movement that the live action movies of the day wouldn’t be able to match, either. The chase is entirely cinematic: there is no dialogue in this segment of the movie, nor is there any narration. The final images of this chase, the jack-o-lantern zooming at the camera and then the aftermath in the morning, where the only sign of the missing schoolmaster is the shattered remains of the pumpkin, lend the whole thing a wonderful ambiguity. There is no happy ending here. Our hero does NOT escape the Headless Horseman, and we don’t really know what happened to him.

The other element of the film that really sells it is the narration by Bing Crosby. Crosby’s voice has a wonderful, sepulcheral resonance. It’s a folksy, American voice, too, one that recalls the paintings of Norman Rockwell, one that would be at home wrapped around the darker poems of Robert Frost. Crosby’s voice winks at the audience in the first act of the film, sings wonderfully in the second act, and communicates the lonesome menace of the third. Paired with the text at hand, the voice transforms the story into folklore. And like the best Halloween folklore, it has kept generations of children awake at nights, wondering about the final fate of Ichabod Crane...