How Sleepy Hollow became Tim Burton’s most underrated film

Back in 1999, the Johnny Depp horror, about a series of headless horsemen killings at the turn of the 19th century, was a big win for the eccentric director. Geoffrey Macnab asks why ‘Sleepy Hollow’ has largely slipped off the radar

Christina Ricci and Johnny Depp in ‘Sleepy Hollow’ (Paramount)

Does Sleepy Hollow have the reputation it deserves? Tim Burton’s decapitation-filled 1999 horror came at the tail end of the director’s heyday, before his filmography was overrun by CGI-addled blockbuster nothingness. And yet the film, which turns 25 this year, is seldom mentioned among Burton’s great achievements. In the advance publicity for a massive touring exhibition, The World of Tim Burton (coming to London’s Design Museum in the autumn), Beetlejuice (1988), Batman (1989) and Edward Scissorhands (1990) are all talked up. Sleepy Hollow isn’t even mentioned.

That wasn’t always the case. Adapted from a much-loved Washington Irving short story (that also inspired a 1949 Disney animation featuring Bing Crosby), Sleepy Hollow was a success when it first came out, making over $200m at the box office from a budget of less than half that. This was all the more impressive given the restrictive “R” age rating – imposed on the film by censors for “graphic horror, violence and gore, and for a scene of sexuality”. The visionary US filmmaker may have a Gothic sensibility but his films are whimsical, funny and full of ingenious visual flourishes. Sleepy Hollow, set in 1799 and about a series of headless horsemen killings, has all these qualities in abundance and yet it is one of his least celebrated features.

The film is receiving a rare cinema screening in London next month ahead of the release of Burton’s legacy sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice in early September. But that’s unlikely to shunt it back into public consciousness. Sleepy Hollow, though, has Burton’s DNA running through every frame. The cast and crew were later quoted saying that being on set “was almost as if you were walking around the inside of Tim Burton’s head”. Many of its most striking ideas – the blood-spurting tree of death, the windmill with a life of its own, the mist-shrouded forests and graveyards – could come straight from the Edward Scissorhands or The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) playbooks. So just why has one of the director’s richest, most intriguing projects been ignored for so long?

Part of the reason may be its turbulent origins. Sleepy Hollow was conceived as a low-budget exploitation picture. Makeup artist Kevin Yagher (famous for creating the Chucky doll for the Child’s Play franchise) was supposed to direct it. He enlisted Andrew Kevin Walker (who scripted David Fincher’s serial killer classic Se7en) to write the adaptation. “Yagher had plotted Sleepy Hollow as a low-budget effects showcase with a spectacular murder every five minutes or so,” Jim Smith and J Clive Matthews write in their 2002 book on Burton.

Heavyweight producer Scott Rudin optioned the project and sold it to Paramount but the studio didn’t know what to do with it. At the time, Burton had been having extreme difficulty with a project of his own, DC Comics adaptation Superman Lives. Warner Bros got cold feet and cancelled the production three weeks before shooting began. It was at this point he received the Sleepy Hollow script. “After Superman I was happy to chop people’s heads off. It was cathartic,” the director later said. (Yagher still played a key role in creating the human/creature special effects – and in cutting off all those heads.)

So Sleepy Hollow became a strange and contradictory endeavour: a blood-spattered B-movie transmogrified into a big-budget blockbuster; a story that mixed the macabre with the mischievous; a project set in the US but with a distinctly British flavour. “Originally, the film was going to be shot in upstate New York, in the town of Sleepy Hollow; then Tim was keen to shoot it in the UK, so it naturally evolved from there,” Ilene Starger (casting director alongside Susie Figgis) tells me. “But even before it was moved to the UK, I had suggested several brilliant British actors for several roles who did end up in the film.”

Johnny Depp as Ichabod Crane in ‘Sleepy Hollow’ (Paramount)

The film was shot at Leavesden and Shepperton with such stalwarts of the British screen and stage as Michael Gambon, Michael Gough, Ian McDiarmid and Richard Griffiths. In the lead role of Ichabod Crane, a priggish detective investigating a series of brutal killings seemingly committed by a ghostly horseman, Burton cast Johnny Depp. The film marked Burton’s third collaboration with Depp after Scissorhands and Ed Wood.

Burton talked openly of the influence of Hammer horror. He cast Christopher Lee, Hammer’s most exalted star, in a cameo as the irascible chief magistrate/burgomaster. “It felt like something of a coup,” Starger says of nabbing Lee (who went on to make four further movies with the director). This was also an opportunity for Burton to pay tribute to Italian cult director Mario Bava’s 1960 horror picture Black Sunday, directly referencing the famous scene of Britain’s “first lady of horror” Barbara Steele having a metal mask with spikes squashed into her face.

It was absolutely incredible as a young boy to be on this set. It was like Disneyland

Marc Pickering, actor

Burton had wanted to make the film in black and white, an idea the studio would never have countenanced – despite the recent critical success of Burton’s colourless Oscar-winner Ed Wood. Sleepy Hollow is shot in deliberately muted autumnal colours by its virtuoso Mexican cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki. The grey palette has the effect of making the splashes of red all the more striking and lurid. The film is arguably the last “pure” Burton movie before digital visual effects took over from the old-fashioned film craft at which he excelled – all the more reason to pay it extra attention.

Marc Pickering, who played Young Masbath, Ichabod’s assistant, when he was a 12-year-old Hull schoolboy, recalls the experience fondly. “It was absolutely incredible as a young boy to be on this set. It was like Disneyland,” Pickering enthuses to me. “They were filming in a big massive warehouse. You had a guy called Max who was doing all the clouds and all the smoke.” Pickering talks about the astonishing tricks of perspective that Burton played with the cemetery, full of gravestones stretching into the distance that looked very realistic but were in fact only a few centimetres tall.

Tim Burton and Johnny Depp behind the scenes of ‘Sleepy Hollow’ (Paramount)

Depp’s Ichabod is a fey and soft-spoken figure who ruffles feathers with his new-fangled idea of using science and deduction to solve crimes. The director relished the idea of a very cerebral hero pitted against an antagonist who didn’t actually have a head at all. Depp was in his mid-thirties during filming but he’s such a gentle, youthful figure that few viewers questioned his growing romantic attachment to the farmer’s daughter Katrina, played by Christina Ricci, then only 19.

Burton was keen to work with the mercurial former Addams Family child actor. “It’s like if Peter Lorre and Bette Davis had a child, it would be like Christina,” he said. He likened Ricci to a silent movie star. During the scarier scenes, she would provide the young Pickering with a shoulder to cry on (“which, for a 12-year-old boy, was a bit exciting,” the former child actor confides).

During the scene when Depp is chopping into the tree of death, Burton stood off camera with a syringe, “squirting us with blood”, Pickering says. “When Johnny Depp was cutting away and it [the camera] was on him, every time he made a cut, you’d have Tim Burton swabbing him with blood from the syringe.”

The director and his actor seemed to find the whole process hilarious. “I think they enjoyed doing their own thing and not pleasing the majority,” Pickering says. “If they found something that made them laugh, they’d go with that and not worry about the consequence. They had a great shorthand with each other and were very playful between takes.” If ever Depp was worried about overacting, he’d ask Burton at the end of a take: too subtle?

Walken in the woods: legendary actor Christopher Walken in ‘Sleepy Hollow' (Paramount)

This was a huge production on the same sound stages where Star Wars: The Phantom Menace had shot a few months before. Pickering remembers going off on his lunch break to look at the spaceships left behind from the George Lucas production.

Christopher Walken, meanwhile, approached his role as the Hessian horseman in a wildly baroque fashion. He had no dialogue whatsoever but it’s still a memorable performance, one that relies on the character’s aggressive demeanour, manic gaze and his jagged teeth for its impact. Like the movie as a whole, it’s both sinister and funny. The horseman may be a homicidal maniac but he has a haircut that makes him look like a 70s punk who has just wandered onto set off King’s Road.

“You could tell that Tim Burton and Johnny Depp loved him [Walken] and respected him,” Pickering recalls. “They’d take the mick out of him for being quite a serious actor. He was afraid of horses so they built him a whole mechanical horse for his close-ups… I believe it [the fear of horses] was from an accident he had had on [Bond movie] A View to a Kill. One threw him off and he just said ‘never again’!”

As the villainous, lustful and manipulative Lady Van Tassel, Miranda Richardson is in the same playful but imperious mood as when she portrayed the supremely haughty Queen Elizabeth I in Blackadder II. She gives the impression that she is doing all manner of terrible things mainly for a lark. There are also strange lyrical interludes, for instance the magical but very incongruous flashback to Ichabod’s childhood in which his mother Lady Crane (Lisa Marie) suddenly starts to levitate.

Autumn shades: Burton’s film plays out with an earthy fall palette (Paramount)

Perhaps the biggest reason for Sleepy Hollow’s relative anonymity is its gory excess. It was never a film that parents could comfortably watch with their kids. There are, quite simply, too many scenes of characters getting their noggins lopped off. “Heads will roll” was the tagline on the poster. Martin Landau, who won an Oscar for playing Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood, reappears here – for a minute or two at the beginning before the headless horseman takes a big swipe at him with his sword. Our final glimpse of him is of the tendrils where his neck used to be. His blood ends up spattered on a turnip-topped scarecrow.

Even more grisly is the scene when a little boy hides beneath the floorboards as the headless horseman kills his mother and father. Movie convention would dictate that children always escape in scenes such as this – but Burton turns that convention on its head.

Twenty-five years after its release, the film is still considered too excessive for the Saturday matinee audience. But it’s far too quirky to sate the bloodlust of hardcore horror fans. With Sleepy Hollow having fallen into relative obscurity, surely now is the moment to exhume one of the most idiosyncratic pictures of its era. Burton’s tale about the decapitated horseman is actually one of his best – it’s time audiences were given the heads-up.

‘Sleepy Hollow’ screens at BFI Imax, 4 August. ‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ is released 6 September. The World of Tim Burton is at the Design Museum from 25 Oct 2024 to 21 April 2025