| Horror
Movie Index
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Sleepy Hollow, 1999. Directed by Tim Burton. Johnny
Depp, Christina Ricci, Michael Gough, Jeffrey Jones, Miranda Richardson,
Christopher Lee.
Fifteen years into his career, temperamentally Goth director Tim Burton has finally gotten around to making an outright horror movie. Oh, he has wanted to do it for years, as testified by his borrowing of horror movie images for movies like Beetlejuice, the Batman movies, and Edward Scissorhands, but, as the ads testify, in Sleepy Hollow, heads finally roll. And my, my, my, what a confection Sleepy Hollow is. It is probably the most attractively mounted horror movie since Alien. It distills horror movie imagery from seventy years of horror movies into a strange gothic fairyland that bears a striking resemblance to Halloweentown from Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas. The principal inspirations for the movie are the movies from Hammer Studios, and Sleepy Hollow includes appearances from Hammer stalwarts Christopher Lee and Michael Gough. But the movie also borrows from the German Expressionists, the Universal Horrors, Walt Disney, Roger Corman, and Mario Bava. On the whole, it out-does them all in terms of design and image. The best image in the movie is a shot of the fog snuffing out the torches of the night watch, but the bleeding tree which acts as the home to the Headless Horseman is almost as vivid. Burton takes advantage of the plot he has been given to string these images together one after another and the cumulative effect is striking. The Horseman himself is a hum-dinger of a monster, and the movie makes a run at the Madame Defarge Humanitarian Award for all time best screen decapitation (previously held by The Omen). However, being a Tim Burton film, it is burdened by that bugaboo that has plagued Burton's movies from the outset. It has a thin plot--the plot of an action thrill ride in disguise, actually, and don't even look for Washington Irving hereabouts--which Burton cheerfully ignores. The result is another cotton candy confection of a movie that resembles the jack 'o lantern the Headless Horseman carries in one particular sequence. It looks scary, it looks GREAT in fact, but on the inside, it is empty as hell. |