Mocking Halloween: Sleepy Hollow

What isn’t there to love about Tim Burton’s Gothic masterpiece telling about the classic ghost story? Sleepy Hollow is what happens when you give a man, who loves the style already, the source material and he runs with it. Essentially it’s about Ichabod Crane, a New York detective, who travels to the town of Sleepy Hollow to investigate a series of strange beheadings. While in the town he is told of the Headless Horseman; the vicious ghost of a Hessian horseman who chops off heads at his will and townspeople believe he is the one doing it. Old folktales. Well, Ichobod, futile in his attempts to prove them wrong through science, soon realizes that the legend is true. What bothered me about this movie was the fine-tuned plot.

This is a pretty big spoiler alert, however. See, the Headless Horesman was raised from the dead by a conniving bitch that wanted to get revenge on somebody for evicting her when she was younger. Also, she wanted to kill off all the heirs to her husband’s, who was the landlord who evicted her, fortune as well as anybody who caught onto her financial get-rich-quick scheme. What the fuck? As a kid I didn’t care about heirs and old women getting loaded off their dead husband, I wanted this to be a real ghost story and not about the dead getting raised. I had to watch the movie several times just to figure out why the woman wanted everybody dead and what her plan was. That’s not really something I want to do when I am watching a ghost story. It should have been simple and straight to the point. Sure it was Burton’s own twist but… I want a ghost and not a Hessian lackey.