A magnificent film!

Rating: Null/10 (10 August 2003)

Nearly two centuries after Washington Irvin's prose first gave American readers goosebumps, Tim Burton has succeeded in giving a new generation the willies on cool autumn nights.
Burton and writers Kevin Yagher and Andrew Kevin Walker take Irvin's classic American short story and flesh it out-much like a buried Hessian reanimated from the grave. True, they mainly use Irvin's story as an inspiration, not a blueprint; yet the end product is a film that provides a rich evening of entertainment and chills for today's audiences. Surely Mr. Irvin would have wanted it that way.
Instead of a gluttonous, cowardly school teacher, intent on marrying Katrina Van Tassel for her wealth, Icabod Crane (Johnny Depp) is a combination Quincy and Columbo, a late 18th century rationalist and reformer. He is a New York City constable, where his pleas for modern police and judiciary methods keep him in hot water. It is this that leads him to be sent to Sleepy Hallow, a quiet upstate hamlet where all heck has recently broken loose. If this modern scientific malarkey really works, the local brugomaster (horror great Christopher Lee) tells him, make it work in Sleepy Hallow!
Intent on solving the heinous beheading of three Sleepy Hallow residents, Crane heads for the eerily foggy village and is immediately kissed (during a parlor game) by a blindfolded Katrina (Christina Ricci). He quickly gets on the locals' bad side by tartly scoffing at their claims that a headless Hessian soldier from the American Revolution has risen from the dead and is responsible for the deaths. His faith in reason and science will put sorely put to the test.
SPOILERS
Irvin's story, of course, used the Headless Horseman only as a tease. Anyone-even children-reading between the lines realized that bully Brom `Bones' Van Brunt dressed as the Horseman and attacked poor Icabod with a Jack-O-Lantern, scaring him away from Katrina and the Hallow forever. The 1999 tale, however, is no harmless fable of a greedy and incompetent schoolmaster. Here the Headless Horseman proves to be a real entity, raised from the dead by a local who dug up its skull and summons it by witchcraft to do his/her bidding.
Burton weaves a wonderfully eerie Gothic tale of horror and suspense as Icabod sees his rationalistic beliefs shattered and overcomes a near nervous breakdown to vow to fight the demon. The cinematography and music are outstanding, as are the backdrops of the Sleepy Hallow and NYC buildings. A real 1799 feel is created by the intricate attention to detail. Even the gnarled trees and stumps in the haunted Western Woods are spooky. No wonder the original Icabod was spooked whenever he had to ride from lodging to lodging at night!
Depp turns in his usual first-rate performance as the likeable but eccentric Crane. Facing painful, repressed childhood memories as he comes to grips with the supernatural realm, he shows outstanding depth. Ricci is wonderful as Katrina, lovely, steadfast and a tad mysterious. The supporting cast, including Marc Pickering as Young Masbeth and Miranda Richardson as Lady Mary Van Tassel, is marvelous. Christopher Walken, meanwhile, is quite memorable as the Hessian when he had his head. (In fact he is almost a more frightening figure than his headless corpse is!)
A few delicious bits of humorous dialogue are slipped in. (Three would-be Horseman victims are warned to `Watch your heads' as they duck through a doorway to hide from the demon in a windmill. `Is he dead?' Young Masbeth asks after the windmill in which the Horseman had charged has exploded into a ball of fire. `That's the problem,' Icabod calmly replies. `He was dead to begin with!') Still, this is no horror spoof. It is a genuine chill-provider, with witchcraft, secret pacts, murder and betrayal around every bend. Other than Crane's occasionally anachronistic behavior (Entering an apparent witch's lair and announcing that he makes no judgments about her lifestyle is a bit of a stretch!), Burton and his writers succeed in capturing a 1799 feel to the movie.
Overall, this is one of the most fulfilling, spinetingly horror flicks I have seen in recent years. Burton and the writers, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubeski, music composer Danny Elfman, and the rest of the cast and crew deserve a solid `A' for this effort.