Word: hollowed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...intend to mislead you. This was not an out-of-the-way excursion for me. For most of my childhood, I lived a mere pumpkin toss away from the woods that the Headless Horseman and other ghosts are rumored to have haunted. I passed through Sleepy Hollow and its brother town, Tarrytown, all the time. Its 7-11 and Baskin Robbins were perfect spots for midnight snacks. I ran cross-country races in some of the town's back woods. I even took my SAT's at Sleepy Hollow High School. But, through all those years, I was entirely unaware...
...clear idea of where to start in my search for the fear inspiring Sleepy Hollow that hides within the comfortable small town where I grew up. Where better than the home of Washington Irving? I was certain that if the spirit of the Headless Horseman still resided somewhere, it would be in the vast fields that surround Irving's house. So, I headed over to the estate, bought a ticket for the tour and braced myself for what was destined to put a Universal Studios horror tour to shame. Sure, I began to be skeptical when I saw that...
...latest project--despite the standard action-packed previews--is decidedly Burton genre. Sleepy Hollow takes the basic outline of a suspenseful story, complicates it, and wraps it up in a shadowy portrait another alternate reality...
...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...
...Those who want to revive their childhood reactions to this spooky but charming ghost story should rerent the Disney cartoon. Sleepy Hollow in Burton's hands is a darker, stranger, cheaper shade of horror. It's less clippety-cloppety, more blood-spattery. Irving's simple three-main-character plot gives way to a convoluted collection of Van Tassles and other conniving townspeople who sustain an even more convoluted chain of mysterious events for the investigative Ichabod to logically piece together. More of a saga and certainly scarier and gorier than the original tale, the film version maintains an oddly light...