It may not be the best Tim Burton movie, but it could be the most Tim Burton movie.
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.
