by Jane Ward

Created on: August 04, 2008   Last Updated: September 22, 2008

"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving is a spooky piece of Americana that reads like a folk tale and puts even a contemporary audience right into the village where it takes place. Part ghost story and part commentary on the human condition, it gives the reader the shivers without sensationalizing itself.

1999's big screen event "Sleepy Hollow" is yet another example of Tim Burton experimenting with the fantasy genre, infusing a story with his signature brand of dark humour based on eeriness taken over the edge to the ridiculous, and, of course, giving Johnny Depp crazy eyes and a preposterous hairdo in what I can only imagine is a quest to find the point at which die-hard fans will begin to find him physically unattractive.

While entertaining as it's own piece of storytelling(if you like Burton's work), "Sleepy Hollow" completely misses the mark on the characters, plot, and tone of Irving's original work. The buffoon schoolteacher Ichabod Crane, played by Johnny Depp, is turned into a detective from New York City who comes to the little village to investigate a recent slew of murders.

The glowing coquettish farm girl Katrina van Tassell is given a downright ghostly portrayal by Christina Ricci, who seems to be channeling her childhood role in the Addams Family movies.

I warn those of you who are still interested in seeing the film that I am about to ruin the ending, but it's important that I do so, because there are two enormous differences in the plot which render the story almost completely unrecognizable.

The first is that there is an actual headless horseman. Just as Washington Irving said, he was a Hessian soldier who rides about at night looking for his lost head. However, while Irving heavily implies that this "legend" of Sleepy Hollow is exactly that, and nothing supernatural actually went on, the movie says, with no room for interpretation, that the legend is truth. The every-terrifying Christopher Walken makes an excellent cameo as both horseman and head.

The second glaring difference between movie and book is that, while the key to the story is that no one ever found exactly exactly WHAT happened to Ichabod Crane, the movie shows him not only safe back in New York as the book implied but accompanied by his new wife Katrina and the child of one of the horseman's murder victims, whom they seem to have either adopted or taken on as a servant.

There are also some dark flashbacks to Ichabod's childhood, implying that his father was a minister, and murdered his mother for being a witch, as well as a mystery involving scars on Ichabod's hands that he claims to have had for as long as he can remember. While there is a supposed relevance to the main plot of the movie that ties into Ichabod's past, I don't find it strong enough for them to belong there, as they are distracting from the action, and have such an unrealistic and almost psychedelic feel to them as to give a further sense of disbelief to an already fantasy-laden film.

With its critically altered plot, slew of completely new characters, unambiguous ending, and all-around completely different feel (perhaps this is why they took the "legend" bit out of the title) "Sleepy Hollow" will dissapoint fans of the book who would prefer a more faithful interpretation. However, as a supernatural murder mystery all its own, it will prove to hold its audience for a moderately enjoyable two hours, even if movie-goers have exhausted all deep discussion of it by the time the disc is out of the machine.

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