Word: headlessness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...nearly 200 years the tale has kept children awake and atremble--or lulled them to sleep with Washington Irving's drolly orotund style. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is still a bedtime staple in tonier households, and with its Headless Horseman hurling a grimacing pumpkin at the head of Ichabod Crane, the story helped create the American giddying-up of Halloween as a funny fright night. But like so many old fables, Sleepy Hollow is chiefly remembered in its Disney version. That 1958 cartoon short, a genial mix of comedy and anxiety, took its tone from the voice...
...there a Headless Horseman? Then he'd better cut off some heads--heads that, when detached by the whoosh of the Horseman's blade, go spinning, rolling, bobbing as if each were a top, a bowling ball, a Halloween apple on its way from Hollow to hell. (The terminally cool Tussaud effects are by Kevin Yagher, who also worked on the script.) Irving's Horseman, a long-dead Hessian mercenary, was most likely a story to scare away intruders and, when Ichabod sees him, a human prankster toying with the gullible schoolteacher. Here, though, the creature must be realer than...
...Washington Irving's classic ghost story of the Headless Horseman provides merely a jumping off point for Burtons dark imaginings. For those who have not read the book or watched the Disney cartoon, the traditional tale is set in Sleepy Hollow, a small New York suburb, in 1799. A headless horseman haunts the outskirts of the town and chops off people's heads in revenge for having lost his own --or so goes the rumor in town. When lanky, schoolteaching Ichabod Crane comes to town, alienating the locals with his intellectual pretentiousness, he scoffs at the legend and further ruffles...
...Speaking of the ordinarily recognizable becoming barely that: the headless horseman--when he has a head in a flashback and in the resolution--is played by Christopher Walken. Walken's silent performance is sure to make you start out of your seat at least the first time you see him. His gnarly-teeth, wild hair and demonic eyes make you regard his subsequent headlessness as less of a fright and more of a relief...
...more disturbingly on the original. Irving's tale becomes entwined in a complicated plot of greed and corruption, a horrifying subplot explaining the psychological warping of Ichabod, and several impressive fight scenes in which the decapitations have an especially martial flare. (Star Wars fans may notice similarities between the headless sword-wielding skills and the light saber moves of Darth Maul in The Phantom Menace. They're played by the same actor, Ray Park...