It is so obvious he wants us to laugh with fear

Rating: 9/10 (8 October 2015)

This one is a classic, a witch and haunted classic. Since it comes from a very distant time, 1799, in 1999, to celebrate the millennium anyway after celebrating an older millennium, when everyone was expecting the end of the world and the Apocalypse, there is no need to play at "suspending your disbelief" because in 1799 they did believe in ghosts, in curses, in the devil, in witches and many other things like that, though deeply motivated by inheritance, property, possessions, riches, land owning, and a few other things like that.
And sure enough Tim Burton does not bother to bring the old story by Washington Irving to the level of disbelief of the last year of the twentieth century. On the reverse he aggravates the case for our enjoyment. Because that is all it is, enjoyment of the living dead, the headless riding ghost, the fear and the fright of these simple people of these old days who were afraid of some sorcery, of a curse from one woman who wanted both her vengeance against a landlord and the means to capture his fortune.
And this time the film is a real jewel, a gem that we enjoy sip by sip and sniff by sniff, gulp by gulp and glimpse by glimpse. Finally Mr. Tim Burton found a real Halloween story to tell us that we all knew was a Halloween story and that we could enjoy peacefully since the only objective was to enjoy our temporary pangs of fear with the riding vengeful justice ghost who will finally manage to get his vengeance and his carnal pleasure with the witch who had been able to control him because she recuperated his skull from his ostracized grave where his decapitated skull had been buried.
But it took a young constable from New York playing CSI before it was ever invented, serial killers and profiling before they even were or had been heard of to sort out the truth from the fable, the ghost from the criminal, fear from reality and he was able to bring back to New York, the happy schmuck, a future wife and a valet. You will necessarily enjoy it especially since you will have to wait for the very last scene to understand the whole business, because it was business before all and above all.
And you know time is business, so let's save some time, hence some money, and let me tell you, this one is a good film by Tim Burton though it has little philosophical and ethical value. Shallow but really suspenseful and maybe a little bit surprisingly frightening. The morbidity of this film is just the necessary salt, sugar and pepper to make the medicine go down.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU