Oooo spooky…Lisa from Boondock Ramblings and I are are watching and posting about spooky cinema for the next two months, here and over on our Instagram accounts. We are starting fairly family friendly and working our way up to the scariest!! I love a thriller or chiller!

This is the movie I have been waiting for! We watch The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, both the cartoon and the Tim Burton version, every single Halloween. I have been watching the Disney cartoon version for longer than I care to say, and upon reading when the Burton version came out, yeah, that one too.

I love this story for some reason, so much. You know how there are people out there who watch and read every iteration of Jane Austen stories? Well, I am like that with Sleepy Hollow.

Let’s begin with the cartoon, shall we?

We watched this one with Wyatt and like his mother, he loved it. It will always be nostalgic for me. My little brother and I used to watch it together every year, we know all the words, and now we watch it with our children. It’s pretty fantastic. Brom Bones is a perfect villain, Ichabod the quirkiest hero (although, is he?), and Bing Crosby singing and narrating just is the icing on the cake.

I have two favorite parts – the scene where Brom is singing about the Headless Horseman and scaring the heck out of Ichabod, and the part where Ichabod is heading home from the party through the woods that night. I love how they made all the sounds of the woods at night have an alternate sound – the toads croaking Ichabod, the birds cry sounding like beware..there is just so much in that one part.

Then, after Wyatt fell asleep, we moved on to the Tim Burton version.

At this time in my life, 1999, I loved Johnny Depp and Christina Ricci (and Winona Ryder but she wasn’t in this one) and I remember being so excited to see this movie in the theater. It literally came out the day after my birthday, so my friends and I went as part of my birthday celebration. And I was instantly a big fan. It turned my childhood spooky season favorite into a version that young adult me loved just as much. And now middle age me still loves it. Crazy.

The costume and set design for this movie is amazing – everything is so visually interesting. The village of Sleepy Hollow is not so beautiful and quaint, not like the wholesome look of the one in the cartoon. It is more grim, ramshackle, and reflects the atmosphere of a town gone wrong. Because something is very wrong in Sleepy Hollow – people just keep getting beheaded.

The town elders send away to the city (NYC) for a detective, and loose cannon weirdo detective Ichabod Crane played by Johnny Depp is sent to investigate. He brings his toolkit of inventions and relies heavily on science, logic, and reason, and refuses to believe anything supernatural could be behind the murders. Until the day he comes face to er..face with the Headless Horseman. That sends him shaking to his bed. But he quickly rallies and gets back on the job. Unfortunately, the Horseman seems to have an agenda and despite Crane’s presence and investigation, the townsfolk just keep on dying. Crane figures out the secret, that the Horseman is being controlled by a flesh and blood human being – only who could it be? Baltus Van Tassel? The sweet Katrina?

Every actor in this movie is phenomenal and the cast included some big names – Johnny Depp, Christina Ricci, Christopher Walken (so creepy good!), /Michael Gambon, Jeffrey Jones, Miranda Richardson to name a few. Let me amend – almost every actor. Billy and I are not sold on Casper Van Dien as Brom Bones. He just didn’t have the presence in our opinion to play such an important character. However, we can’t think of anyone who would be better. Any suggestions? We also are so confused about young Ichabod’s home life. Was his dad a minister? Why did he have a room full of torture devices? Was he a witch hunter – and if so, why did he marry a witch? Also, wasn’t the whole witch trials over by 1799? We talk about this every time we watch.

This movie was the creepiest and goriest of the movies we watched for spooky season – the perfect last hurrah and I am so glad that we built our way up to it. It was a perfect finale to our Spooky Season Cinema. You can read Lisa’s movie thoughts here!

Let’s give some props to Lisa – she was a super trooper through this spooky season cinema as she is not a fan of spooky movies.

And, we had so much fun with this, that we are doing it all over again for Christmas! We will start posting the week of Thanksgiving and we would love to make it a linky event as well!