Critical Analysis: Sleepy Hollow

Director Tim Burton, more than any Hollywood director, understands this atmosphere well. From such classics as Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Frankenweenie, Burton knows how to use classic gothic imagery to get his viewer’s to ‘feel’ the atmosphere. His best effort seems to be his recent retelling of the famous Washington Irving story, Sleepy Hollow.

Irving’s version tells the story of a timid and eccentric schoolteacher who comes to face to face with a Headless Horseman on Halloween night. Burton’s version on the other-hand greatly elaborates on this ghostly tale. The school teach

While Tim Burton is great artist and can masterfully paint a picture within a film, his films on a whole usually fall short of the mark, mostly because Burton tends to put “looks” on a higher pedestal than story. He uses characters as visual props and visual superficiality. It seems that many of Burton’s so-called “horror” films turn out to be not that horrific at all, and in turn tend to be less entertaining. What makes Sleepy Hollow an enjoyable horror movie is its appreciation of tragedy. Whether it's the rejected "child" of Dr. Frankenstein, or the immortal vampire unable to truly live, many of the classic horror movies use tragedy as a thematic element and to also relate the story to aspects of our own lives. Good horror monsters, if you can call them that, are usually victims, and their rampages come from common emotional fears. At first the viewer may think that Christopher Walken’s Headless Horseman is just some ‘spiffy’ special effect used for a good, cheap scare. But thankfully, this is not the case, and rather the Headless Horseman is only a terror to the town of Sleepy Hollow because he is suffering from injustice. The injustice being that his head is taken from its grave by Miranda Richardson’s character. The scenes with the Headless Horseman are shot and edited with such care. Unlike most horror films that use fast cuts and fast action, Burton shoots the Headless Horseman’s scenes in either Medium shots or wide angles. He wants the viewer to get a full-on view of this frightening character, which makes the viewer identify the Headless Horseman as not just another “prop” as some Hollywood creatures can be. The horseman is in fact one of the best horror figures to come out of this type of film. He’s the classic outlaw seeking justice.

“The decapitations may provide the stuff of nightmares, but on a deeper level they also provide a fitting image of humanity's freedom from the shackles of rational thought. Increasingly, our culture expresses its disillusionment with the promises o

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