What Movie Should I Watch Tonight? ‘Sleepy Hollow’ on Paramount+

Considering how many Halloween-appropriate classics Tim Burton has been involved with over the years, it’s kind of stuffing that The Nightmare Before Christmas — which is a Christmas movie as much as a Halloween one, and which he technically did not direct! — is the only one that gets regular, near-annual re-releases. (It might well be playing in your town this weekend; at this point, almost half of its lifetime box office comes from after its initial 1993 release.) Warner Bros. finally got into the act this year by doing a 20th anniversary re-release of his equally ghoulish stop-motion project Corpse Bride. But there are so many more! Frankenweenie! Either Beetlejuice! Dark Shadows! But Burton’s most Halloween-y movie of all may be Sleepy Hollow, an adaptation of the classic Washington Irving short story. Naturally, its original 1999 release came several weeks after Halloween, closer to Thanksgiving. It was a big hit anyway, a comeback for Burton following the cultishly beloved but generally alienating Mars Attacks! But it hasn’t yet become a re-release favorite, which means it’s up to you to watch it at the proper time of year.

Why Watch Sleepy Hollow Tonight?

It’s not just for the righteous cause of correcting the film’s original November release. Sleepy Hollow is also legitimately dripping with Spooky Season atmosphere, above and beyond even most other Burton joints. It is not a particularly faithful adaptation of the original story, more closely rendered in Disney’s animated version. Here, Ichabod Crane (Johnny Depp; we get it if he’s a dealbreaker) is a science-favoring New York City police constable who is punished for his impudence by being assigned to a murder case in what passes, circa the turn from the 18th to 19th centuries, for “upstate”: the town of Sleepy Hollow, which today is just about a 40-minute drive from the city. (You need to go at least a couple of hours before you’re properly upstate, guys.)

The murders are gruesome, with victims’ heads cleanly removed and often missing from the crime scene, causing locals to assume that it must be the ghost of the mythical Headless Horseman. Crane dismisses this notion out of hand, and attempts to use the latest in scientific deduction to solve the case. Along the way, he falls in love with Katrina Van Tassel (Christina Ricci), from a moneyed Sleepy Hollow family, and draws the ire of various townsfolk. It probably isn’t a spoiler to reveal that the main departure from the book comes when genuine supernatural forces come into play, though there’s also a more traditional murder-mystery dimension to the story.

The story, as is often the case with Burton, feels secondary. The world of this movie, with gnarled old trees, endless supplies of fog, perpetually rustling leaves, and some of the most gorgeous not-precisely-black-and-white cinematography ever captured (by future Oscar winner Emmanuel Lubezki), is enveloping and tactile as Burton pays tribute to the beloved Hammer horror films of the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. (If you get a taste for them, some of them are streaming for free on Tubi, of course!) This is also the rare R-rated Burton movie — just this and Sweeney Todd — which means that the splashes of color come from the vivid reds of consistent bloodflow. By the time a sharp-toothed Christopher Walken turns up as the full-bodied version of the villain, the movie goes into full-tilt gothic mayhem, with carriage chases, burning buildings, and even more beheadings.

As such, Sleepy Hollow isn’t Burton’s most emotionally complex movies; there’s some neat stuff about the turn of the century meant to parallel the film’s initial 1999 release, but it’s not much interested in exploring the nature of fear or anything like that. Instead, it’s a fun alternate telling of a familiar story. It also features one of Burton’s more restrained collaborations with Depp, who plays Ichabod Crane as a bright man who is nonetheless more comfortable analyzing grotesquerie from a distance; faced with danger, he consistently places a woman or child in front of himself. One of said women is Ricci, in one of her more better big-studio parts; she makes an ethereal yet mysterious figure for Crane to puzzle over.

It’s become a tedious internet sport in over the past 20 years to debate when Burton made his last “good” movie. There’s actually good stuff all across the director’s filmography, so don’t trust anyone who tries to make that particular case for Sleepy Hollow, which would involve ignoring Big Fish, or Sweeney Todd, or Frankenweenie, among others. But there’s certainly a case that Sleepy Hollow ends the first big phase of Burton’s career alongside the ’90s that closed out a month and change later. In retrospect, it feels like a grand farewell to his most obvious inspirations, clearing the slate for some less obvious projects. It’s precisely that archetypal nature that makes it such a great perennial watch, featuring some all-time great Halloween decor.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.

Stream Sleepy Hollow on Paramount+