Sleepy Hollow
Hey, Do You Remember...?
Christopher Schrader
4.8 • 676 Ratings
🗓️ 20 October 2017
⏱️ 96 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Tim Burton's adaptation of Sleepy Hollow plays pretty fast and loose with Washington Irving's source material and for those of who us who grew up with the more faithful Disney cartoon, that was an aspect of this film that definitely took us by surprise.
Going into this, opinions were pretty mixed. Despite this revisionist take on Ichabod Crane and a more complicated lore surrounding the Headless Horseman, Chris loved this movie when he saw it back in 1999. For Donna, the changes were too big a pill to swallow and she was disappointed to discover it was more silly than scary. Carlos had been so put off by the advertising that he'd never even seen this all the way through.
Looking back on it now, Sleepy Hollow marks an interesting point in the careers of Tim Burton and Johnny Depp. What separates this film from some of their less successful collaborations? Is it even that separate? Did they change or did we? And did this more objective viewing alter how any of us felt about it?
Topics include: the film's origins as a low-budget slasher, how Scream reinvigorated the studio's interest in the project and altered their entire approach, Chris' main gripe with the movie and how a sub-genre of Italian horror films helped him reconcile it, whether or not the Horseman should speak, what's really inside the Tree of the Dead, the mean streak running through this that's absent from most of Burton's other work, the exhaustingly complicated final act, and much much more!
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, do you remember Sleepy Hollow? |
| 0:06.3 | Hello and welcome to Hey Do You Remember, a show where we reminisce about a movie or TV series we grew up with, then take off the rose-tinted glasses to see how it holds up. |
| 0:32.1 | I'm Chris. |
| 0:32.8 | I'm Donna. |
| 0:33.7 | And I'm Carlos. |
| 0:34.5 | And today we're revisiting Sleepy Hollow. |
| 0:53.2 | Thank you. and I'm Carlos. And today we're revisiting Sleepy Hollow. Northern European folklore involving a headless horseman actually dates all the way back to the late 1700s. |
| 0:59.9 | But it was author Washington Irving who crafted the definitive depiction of this myth with the legend of Sleepy Hollow, |
| 1:06.1 | a short story first published in 1820 that stands as one of the earliest examples of popular American |
| 1:11.5 | fiction. It would be another century before it was first adapted as a feature-length silent film, |
| 1:16.8 | and since then, the tale has been told and retold in every imaginable medium, stage plays, |
| 1:22.8 | songs, radio dramas, operas, television series, and of course, animation. Because if you're our age, |
| 1:29.9 | there's a strong chance that your introduction to all of this was the Walt Disney cartoon. |
| 1:34.4 | And for decades, the imagery from that depiction was synonymous with Irving's story. |
| 1:39.2 | But in the early 90s, makeup effects legend Kevin Yeager was trying to transition into directing, |
| 1:44.0 | and he had an altogether |
| 1:45.0 | different take on the material in mind. He saw it as a lean and mean low-budget slasher, and partnered with |
| 1:50.9 | screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker to develop a story that would transform gangly schoolmaster |
| 1:55.8 | Iqabod Crane into a disgraced New York City detective. The project was set up at Paramount Pictures, but there |
| 2:01.9 | are probably several factors that resulted in the studio deciding not to pull the trigger on this |
| 2:06.7 | version of the film. For starters, there was the tepid response to Yeager's directorial debut, |
| 2:11.7 | Hellraiser Bloodline. There was also the fact that Walker's spec script 7 was bought by New Line |
... |
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