Word: burtonizing
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...18th century black suits and a perpetual mist clouding the nights sky, this film is shot in color; it just feels black and white. Filmed at an artificial set in a small town in England, Sleepy Hollow is overwhelmingly gray. It takes some getting used to, as all of Burtons fantasies do, but after about ten minutes of acclimation, the setting takes shape, and you come to appreciate the brilliant construction of the town and the landscape. Corn fields shrink in the shadow of freaky-looking scarecrows, an old mansion looms over a hill in the distance, and twisted trees...
...survived Beetlejuice and Batman Returns with a smile on your face, this film is a beautifully dismal glimpse into Burton's newest alternate universe, where supernatural evil is prompted by human vice, and the consequences are so relentlessly gory that even the trees bleed. If only to let the blood flow longer and more freely (even in one gratuitous scene, from the implied decapitation of a little boy), this version of Sleepy Hollow expands significantly and more disturbingly on the original. Irving's tale becomes entwined in a complicated plot of greed and corruption, a horrifying subplot explaining the psychological...
...part of a grand design. The director wraps up all the intentionally frayed loose ends and cleverly dropped clues in an impressively tight, albeit overly direct, resolution. This finely crafted mystery within the spectacle of it all proves that while almost all of the onscreen characters lose their heads, Burton keeps his screwed on tight...
...choose to see it, in all its blood-spattered craftiness and enveloping spookiness, just remember -- it's only a movie; you can rest assured your head isn't going to get chopped off. Although exposure to the shadowy twists and turns of Burton's imagination, inside-John-Malkovich-style, might make it spin...
Sleepy Hollow is only the latest in director Tim Burton's ever-expanding oeuvre of inventively bizarre fairy tales