Indeed, a most curious thing!

Rating: Null/10 (31 October 2000)

Sleepy Hollow is destined to be a Halloween Classic  certainly with me - with a pumpkin head behind every tree. Depp's performance as the agitated constable is in direct relationship to the original, school teacher, Ichobold Crain, while Depp also plays the determined detective who believes in `cause and consequence' rather than `sense without reason'. Yet one of the morals to the story is that so much of life is `without sense or reason'. The film's backgrounds, costumes, and props, as well as the script, is an authentic yet nightmarish twist of the time period. There is an unusual quality to the cinematography  colourless, misty, mystifying and typical of Hell, except with the colourful dream sequences standing out like Dorothy's first view of Oz. The swordsmanship and horsemanship is certainly the finest ever put on the screen, with the Spanish Black Steed, Daredevil, deserving of a Special Oscar.
All of the script reads with an Edgar Allen Poe quality, while Depp, himself, looks like a young Poe (Poe is the grand-daddy to all detective stories). A few views of Ichobold's ledger gives us a view of what he's thinking, which may be the first time such an unusual device has been used in a film to let us know what's going on in a character's mind. The symbolism is incredible and subliminally works on the subconscious mind, often beyond our conscious depths, to produce an uncanny feeling in the soul of the viewer. In particular, the pumpkin `heads'. The blindfolded Katrina with the dream of the blindfolded Mother (love is blind). The Mother's and Katrina's connections with witchery. The bullet stopped by the book to be kept close to the heart for protection. The `blood red' cardinal  Ichobold's pet released; Katrina's favorite bird that she can't cage  as she must feel trapped in Sleepy Hollow; the optical toy; and the decapitated cardinal in the witches den. There is also a sense of `travelling into the unknown' emphasized by several scenes moving down roads or tails.
The film obviously took several comical ideas from the original Disney cartoon as well as the horror of the old Hammer Horror films  in particular, the gimmicks, gadgets, and the desecrated graveyard corpses of the Frankenstein films - which seems to have been intended. All in all, a romanticized yet diabolical faery tale designed to give big and little children nightmares.. Sweet dreams!..