Word: ichabod
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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...
...director wants to turn this fairy tale into a full-blooded ghost story--and a total Tim Burton experience. So for this end-of-the-century parable (it's set in 1799), he imports the bats from Batman, the jack-o'-lantern from Nightmare Before Christmas and, as Ichabod Crane, Johnny Depp from Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wood. Instead of the bright Halloween hues of the Disney version, Burton gives his film a swankly, dankly desaturated color scheme. And just to make sure he doesn't go soft, he hires Andrew Kevin Walker, author of the sleazorific Se7en...
...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 a nightmare--a galloping plague to purge Sleepy Hollow. He is embodied, occasionally, by Christopher Walken, who could terrify small children just by singing I'm a Little Teapot. In full Horseman drag, with...
...Auguste Dupin by several decades, he is America's first detective. He is also a troubled soul, carrying literal scars from childhood and memories that roil his sleep. So handsome, so haunted, he proves irresistible to this Katrina (Christina Ricci). Yet Depp bumbles and stumbles, just like the old Ichabod; he is the hero and the comic relief in one tightly wound package. Doesn't always work, but we've been admiring this actor's bravado and forgiving his excesses for ages. Why stop now? Besides, he ultimately makes Ichabod a truly obsessive romantic hero: Byron by Ahab...
...Burton returns to more twisted territories with Sleepy Hollow. Working once again with Depp, who this time steps into the role of the idiosyncratic Ichabod Crane (now a detective and not, as readers of the original tale may recall, a schoolteacher), Burton's film looks like yet another plunge into unique style, his personal fantasies that are always so entertaining to the rest of the world. One of the few directors who can be said to have a "stable" of actors (including Depp, Jeffrey Jones and Lisa Marie, among others), Burton has made a name for himself through blockbusters that...