I think that Washington Irving would have recognized this story. Just. The plot would, after all, be vaguely familiar. Vaguely. But I think he would have enjoyed this interpretation of his story, and the atmosphere it evokes. To me, it’s reminiscent of the tales that we told around the campfire when I was in the Boy Scouts, but somewhat longer, better told, and with visuals that were lacking to us.

Ichabod Crane, a young and perhaps over-rational New York constable attempting to institute the rule of reason and deduction in a New York police force that is approaching Y18C with some trepidation, is exiled to the upstate New York Dutch village of Sleepy Hollow by an irate magistrate (Christopher Lee, in a cameo) to solve a series of decapitations that are decimating the local population. Complete with his satchel of notebooks and strange-looking home-built forensics instruments, Crane quickly discovers that the town has its secrets, and that one of these secrets is why the Headless Horseman — a genuine headless spook, by the way, though when blessed with a cranium (in flashbacks) he looks remarkably like Christopher Walken with filed teeth — is out to kill off the leading people of the town. Ultimately, Crane must not only find the real culprit and determine his/her motive, but also lay this revenant once and for all.

Crane is played, fairly effectively, by Johnny Depp, looking his usual bloodless Edward Scissorhands self under the eternally sunless upstate New York sky. His dreams of his childhood, with his straitlaced minister father and his magical child-of-nature mother, nicely explain why he has abandoned the magical world around him for a focussed rationality — and, perhaps, also explain why he is so quick to abandon it. Brom van Brunt, on the other hand, played by the humorless Casper van Dien, is hardly developed, and appears only about three times in the first half of the movie (in the second half, he doesn’t appear at all, for obvious reasons). Katrina van Tassel (Christina Ricci), Crane’s love interest, fortunately does not appear in a bikini; if she did, the film would have been banned as child pornography. No disrespect to Katrina; her motives and behavior are so carefully ambiguous through three quarters of the film that they misled not only Ichabod but also me.

There are several nice horseback chases, and a number of good special effects, including at least one explosion that could almost never have happened in the days before Alfred Nobel (note to SFX persons: when a mill explodes, as they do from time to time, it’s usually because the air is saturated with flour dust, not because there are a couple of tons of flour carefully stored in sacks on the floor). From time to time the movie seems to be getting off-track into farce, a la “The Mummy,” but fortunately (or not, depending on your personal preference) it always manages to drift back onto its horrific track. The scene with the horseman riding around and around a church filled with gun-toting townsfolk ⁽¹⁾, like a single Indian besieging a wagon train, was perhaps overdone. So, I think, is the very short covered bridge right in the middle of town, whose only function seems to be to serve as a place to run into ghosts. Well, I vaguely remember from Beetlejuice that Tim Burton likes covered bridges…

I enjoyed the movie.

⁽¹⁾ Widdershins, of course.