Sleepy Hollow: horror film.  Starring Johnny Depp, Christina Ricci, Miranda Richardson, Michael Gambon, Christopher Walken, Jeffrey Jones, Martin Landau, Michael Gough and Christopher Lee.  Screenplay by Andrew Kevin Walker. Story adapted by Walker and Kevin Yagher from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving.  Directed by Tim Burton.  Rated ‘R’. Now playing at Bay Area Theaters.

POSTHOC RATING:  ** ½

Like many of us Boomers, Tim Burton loved the old Hammer horror films of the late 50s and 60s. (We even love them now, though with the qualifications of age). With Sleepy Hollow, his adaptation of the old Washington Irving chestnut, Burton tries to recapture those glory days. Unfortunately he only winds up an OK film that tries hard, maybe too hard, to force a scare into its audience, and so mostly misses the mark.

Most horror stories are virtually plotless, being mostly mood pieces and character studies.  In this updating from the pen of Seven scribe Kevin Andrew Walker, has given us a plot: it’s 1799. A series of gruesome decapitations have shocked the small upstate Hudson Valley New York Community of Sleep Hollow.  Sent to investigate (rather unconvincingly at that) is one young New York City police constable Ichabod Crane (Johnny Depp). The wealthy villagers tell him the murderer is the vengeful Headless Horseman, the vengeful spirit of a marauding Hessian soldier (played in flashbacks by Christopher Walken, in one of his typically marvelous antic performances)

Crane is a man both in and out of his time: he is a new (for the era) breed of detective, a forerunner of Poe’s Auguste Dupin. He’s a rationalist who believes that the tools of science and reason can provide the solutions to crime, rather than the brute offhand methods then common.  

He rides into Sleepy Hollow armed with his rationalist’s faith, certain that his logical methods will unmask what he is sure is but a human killer who is only masquerading as a headless ghoul on horseback. 

But he is of course, as rationalists always are in these stories, wrong.  But as Walker’s screenplay strains to convince us, not entirely wrong.  For there is a method behind this ghoul’s madness.  This village has deep dark guilty secrets that lie at the core of the mystery behind the murders and it is these secrets that Crane must tease out using his scientific wiles.

On a purely visual level Sleepy Hollow is a fantastic treat all the way through.  Inspired by both the original story and by the classic Hammer Horror films of the 50s and 60s (and to a lesser extent, Roger Corman’s Edgar Allen Poe adaptations), Burton and his collaborators, including cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and designer Rick Heinrichs, have created a fabulously eerie world, drenched with dank and dripping Gothic atmosphere. It’s a vision of the Hudson Valley as myth, not reality.  Built mostly on English soundstages, it’s steeped in an orange smokiness and deep mountains of fog and teems with mysterious shadows rarely found in the real world.  The film feels truly clammy in these moments.  (With several shots of the Headless Horseman carrying a fiery Jack O’ Lantern, it’s obvious the film was intended for a Halloween release, but likely delayed for post-production problems). 

Also enjoyable are the various beheadings, which are joyous exercises in Grand Guignol.  Severed heads spin on their victims’ shoulders and fly through the air and bounce on the ground like soccer balls.  The Headless Horseman chops and flails and runs through heads like a bartender poking toothpicks through olives.  It’s wonderfully, hair-raisingly garish and guaranteed to cause some solid shocks. 

Performances are also good.  Depp is his usual delightful eccentric self, playing Ichabod Crane as a jittery uptight neurotic whose rationalism is a mere brittle shield against his unbearable past.  It’s a funny and touching performance, because of Depp’s ability to convey how Crane’s soul shrinks in the presence of the unknown.   Almost the whole cast deserves credit for remaining rooted in the theatrical style of the 19^th Century and disdaining Modernist flourishes that ruin so many of the historical films being made now. The presence of veterans like Martin Landau and Michael Gough also adds to the atmosphere.  And I wish there was a lot more of Christopher Lee who only gets one brief cameo in the beginning (it also made me wish Vincent Price and Peter Cushing were still with us. How this film would hum!). 

However, Christina Ricci isn’t quite right as the love interest Katrina Van Tassel.  She does her best, but seems a too modern and unable to insert herself into the period.  She comes across as too much the 21^st Century gal.  Some critics have complained about the awkward antiquated dialogue, but compared to The Messenger Sleepy Hollow’s dialogue is Shakespeare. Screenwriter Walker at least shows some respect for the style in which the story was written.

But that respect doesn’t carry to the mystery plot he’s grafted onto it.  The mystery turns out to be a vague, clumsy and mechanical one. The Headless Horseman, while supernatural enough, is only a puppet whose strings are being pulled by a very terrestrial source.  Instead of a ghoul with his own atavistic (and thrilling) agenda we have a monster conjured up to do its Mad Master’s evil bidding. It’s rather like the later films in the Universal horror cycle, where Doctor Frankenstein revived the Monster, the Wolfman and Dracula in order to fulfill his evil dreams of conquest.  They weren’t especially good then and they’re not good now. 

It’s a lame device and strips the film of its true mystery.  Ghost Story author Peter Straub once remarked there was always something supremely stupid at the center of every horror story.  “Stupid” may be too strong a term, but the rationalist mystery sewn onto this campfire tale only draws attention to the fancifulness of the conception. With the real power merely human, the threat diminishes and so do the thrills, in a genre where a sense of eternal terrible mystery is so much a part of its peculiar chilling joy.  Watching a good horror film (or reading or hearing a good story) is somewhat like being hypnotized: it happens slowly, gradually, rhythmically, until the apocalyptic payoff.  There’s a special macabre poetic cadence to them.  Sleepy Hollow has no cadence at all.  It clunks. 

Several other sequences fall flat, including a lame one where the Horseman attacks the village church.  Action scenes have never been strong points in Tim Burton films (and yes, I do include both Batmans).  Having the Horseman ride around in full view of everyone merely diminishes him, turns him into a 19^th century Terminator on Horseback.  (As a trivia note: the rider is played by Ray Park, who made one of the few big impressions in Star Wars: the Phantom Menace.) In other words, like another recent misfire The Mummy, we get a typical 90s action film.

Danny Elfman’s overblown music score hits more sour notes.  Elfman’s done good work in the past, but here, where silence might be most effective, we’re shouted at to be scared as though he and Burton trusted neither their materials nor their audience.  Silence can be an extremely effective method of inducing shock, terror and suspense, but Elfman (no doubt with Burton’s approval) relentlessly hammers us with obvious cues. There’s no surprise, because Elfman’s score telegraphs every single one.

Another master fantasist, Fritz Leiber Jr. pointed out that in traditional mysteries, the mystery is eventually solved, but in horror fiction, the mystery goes on forever.  Sleepy Hollow tries to have it both ways and winds up flat.  We get an action mystery instead, of all things.