You may not know it from my tirade against them in
my 30 Days of Halloween post on “This is Halloween” and “The Nightmare BeforeChristmas,” but there was a time when I really, really liked Johnny Depp and
Tim Burton. Like, a LOT.
And that time was 1999, and that was because of a
little movie called “Sleepy Hollow.” The love I had for them that began with “Edward
Scissorhands” and grew with “Cry Baby” culminated with “Sleepy Hollow,” that dark, a-little-scary movie where Depp started his weird-goofy shtick and
Christina Ricci was hauntingly beautiful and Christopher Walken was the scariest
he’s ever been. And that’s saying something, since Walken consistently steps up
his creepy game. Have you seen “Seven Psychopaths”? I mean, really.
But back to the task at hand: “Sleepy Hollow” is a
perfect Halloween movie because, you know, all the Goth-ness of it. Very
loosely based on the short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” by Washington
Irving (yes, the same text that inspired that new show on Fox that is actually
doing pretty well right now), the film feels like a turning point for Burton.
It cost a good chunk of change for the time—$100 million—and did alright, making $200 million
internationally, and it feels like it has all the Burton calling-cards, before
they became clichés.
A murky, dark atmosphere, with that super-creepy Tree of
the Dead. A beautiful, innocent heroine, controlled by an evil parental figure
(not unlike Sally from “The Nightmare Before Christmas”). An intelligent but
unwilling hero, tortured by his own past. And corpses and blood and torture
devices and witchcraft and the actual Devil. It’s some dark shit! Maybe the darkest
movie Burton has ever made, before he got into his Disney dungeon of
family-friendly crap.
What else does it have going for it? An admirably
done, steampunk-impacted aesthetic. The charm and beauty of Christina Ricci; I
wish she still did things, and didn’t have to sink to crap like “The Smurfs 2.”
And the wonderful wackiness of Depp, back when he was skinny and not as wrinkly
and seemed like a good dramatic actor trying on weirdness instead of simply
relying on it. I want that Depp back, and I want him to bring this Burton back,
too. And if I can’t get them, well, at least we’ll always have “Sleepy Hollow.”
