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Is the Tim Burton version smarter than it looks? Is Sleepy Hollow secretly brilliant?
Tagged with: 1999 channel awesome doug walker halloween nostalgia critic nostalgia critic editorial sleepy hollow
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You are a film critic and you have never heard of Hammer Horror? Kate Bush wrote a song about Hammer, George Lucas and Tim Burton are big fans of Hammer, they were running from the fifties to the seventies and starred Christopher Lee, Richard Widmark, Richard Gough, Simon Ward, Peter Cushing and Charles Gray and you have never heard of Hammer?
The Woman in Black is a Hammer Horror film as well as Dog Soldiers.
Really.
He said that he was somewhat aware of Hammer and what it offered. And anyways, he’s a critic of the 80’s and 90’s. Not some horror movie expert.
I loved Burton’s Sleepy Hollow from the very start. I still consider it his last good movie. And still it is one of my favourites. When I found out about Disney’s version and watched it, THEN I was like “what the hell is this piece of …”
Most of Burton’s films are love letters to the movies he grew up on. For example, Sweeney Todd was a different kind of take on Hammer Horror. He made Ed Wood in honor of one of the most significantly bizarre directors in genre film history, and then his next film Mars Attacks! was a send-up to Ed Wood’s work. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was satirizing children’s movies. Big Eyes was a send-up to Hitchcock.
The hook of the original tale is that we are left to decide for ourselves whether or not the Headless Horseman is actually real. Maybe Brom Van Brunt told Ichabod the story, then dressed up as the Horseman to scare him out of town. Maybe he killed Ichabod on the outskirts of town (intentionally or not). Or perhaps the Horseman really does exist.
Putting the Horseman on camera and saying “here he is” undermines the integrity of the original fairy tale.
The Hammer influence is undoubtable, but that doesn’t make Sleepy Hollow a good movie in my opinion. The more I watch this movie, the worse it gets. I hate how Burton dumbed everything down and explained everything. We did not need an explanation for the Headless Horseman and we certainly didn’t need all those noisy action-packed swordfights and carriage chases. The original Irving story and Disney animated cartoon were not only scarier, but just-plain more interesting.
I never concider a Tim Burton production with Jonny Depp as a horror movie. Thsoe two has made a genre all of their own. Somehow a stylish gothic genre.
This was a very good movie I liked it