For going on a decade now, one of my Halloween season traditions without fail has been to crack open my copy of the Collected Works of Washington Irving to read The Legend of Sleepy Hollow -one of the greatest ghost stories ever written. It’s such an evocative, atmospheric work that I never get tired of and that never loses its witching power, its inherent and vivid spookiness. It’s one of the classics of American literature for a reason. And yet unlike most other stories of similar stature and cultural ubiquity, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow has never had a good live-action movie adaptation. A Christmas Carol, Little Women, Treasure Island, Huckleberry Finn -all have yielded several movie translations, at least one or two of which have been good. But Sleepy Hollow has not been attempted as often as any of them, and where it has it’s been thoroughly unimpressive.
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To be fair, Sleepy Hollow is a highly difficult story to adapt faithfully. It was written with the conceit of being shared at a party of Irving’s fictional “Knickerbocker Club” -a framing device for several of his stories, including Rip Van Winkle, that allowed him to experiment with different literary voices. And as such it is told in that style of an oral legend, hefty in descriptiveness and very sparse on character dialogue (there are only a couple of brief lines specified). And much of the effect of reading the story is in the particulars of the descriptive language, the way the environment is so richly illustrated, the mood so carefully set -things hard to convey with the same poetry on a purely visual level. This is also one of the reasons any Christmas Carol adaptation in my opinion can only come so close to recreating the power of the book.
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Still, there is enough there in the text to make for a gripping visual piece. Certainly, my imagination runs wild any time I read it. But there’s maybe just not enough to the work more generally. It is a short story after all, and while a bulk of it is background, detailing the superstitious community, the arrival and day-to-day life there of Ichabod Crane and subsequently his efforts to woo Katrina Van Tassel against rival Brom Bones -all of which invite a degree of cinematic expansion, it’s still not really a feature-length story in scope, and filmmakers seem to understand that. A 1922 silent film starring Will Rogers, at 68 minutes, is the only direct theatrical feature-length adaptation that has been made. Over the years, Sleepy Hollow found its home more on television. Vincent Price’s Once Upon a Midnight Scary in 1979 hosted a family-friendly version starring what might have been a perfectly cast Rene Auberjonois. A 1980 TV movie starred Jeff Goldblum, also very fitting for the part. The story was additionally done as a segment on Shelley Duvall’s second series Tall Tales and Legends, featuring Ed Begley Jr. All of these were pretty cheap and not much good in spite of some talent in front of the camera. The story didn’t really get its full due in terms of an adequate production budget until 1999. Unfortunately that came at the expense of fidelity and just good storytelling in general.
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By far the highest profile adaptation of the Legend, the one that shockingly most people seem to be aware of, is Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow, an extremely loose take on the story that is done as a kind of a supernatural conspiracy thriller. And yeah, it’s an incredibly visually stylish movie, even moody (though in a different way than the story), it features some fun and creative violence, and a remarkable supporting cast. But it has no interest in translating the original story, is quite badly written, and stars Johnny Depp as the worst Ichabod Crane with an ill-equipped teenage Christina Ricci as his love interest. But this was the version that stuck with most people and thus informed a cultural impression of Sleepy Hollow for the following decades, up to and including a corny TV series the draws on the film’s depiction of Ichabod as an eighteenth-century policeman. And nobody has tried on such a scale to adapt the story in a more faithful way since -indeed it may never happen.
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But one translation of the story I haven’t mentioned does still carry some renown, marginalized though it might be by Tim Burton’s schlocky Hammer Horror homage. And of all entertainment entities, it was made by Walt Disney. Released in 1949 as one-half of a package film called The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (the other half being based on Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows), Disney’s thirty minute Legend of Sleepy Hollow adaptation is remarkably the best film version of the classic story. Remarkably, because it is put through the usual Disney ringer. There’s a lot of fluff to it, some silly family comedy, a couple musical numbers in lieu of exposition sung by Bing Crosby, also the film’s narrator. In some respects, it couldn’t be further from the tone and atmospheric appeal of the original story. But The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is a folk story importantly, and that folk influence permeates the Disney version even through its whimsy. Crosby’s narration probably helps too. And when it needs to conjure up the more overtly frightful, well, this was a time when Disney certainly wasn’t reluctant to do such a thing.
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Let’s first take a little look at how this film came about. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was one of several classic works of literature that Disney had wanted to adapt for a while. This, more than fairy tales, was arguably their priority in those early years, and Sleepy Hollow was initially developed to be a feature coming out of the war years, during which time Disney exclusively produced anthology package films for cheap as their resources were directed towards American propaganda. An adaptation of The Wind in the Willows had been in the works for much longer, and had had an extremely troubled production -delayed due to the war and a four-month animators strike, financial difficulties put it on indefinite hold twice, and ultimately it had to be cut down significantly to a short film. Needing something to pair it with in order to release it as a feature, Disney turned to the Sleepy Hollow film, which also became a short likely for similar issues. And if you watch the film you can tell that Willows has been cut down from a larger project -it’s story is perhaps too expansive for its runtime and it has a full voice cast where Sleepy Hollow features only the narration of Crosby and supporting vocals from Jud Conlon’s Rhythmaires -his regular radio colleagues. The directors were Disney journeymen Jack Kinney and Clyde Geronimi, and stylistically the short isn’t particularly distinct from what else the company was turning out at that time -it was certainly no Fantasia or Bambi.
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And yet that animation is pretty special now, not in the least given the studio had to cut back in the following decades -never quite reaching the heights again of that 1937-42 Golden era. But in sync with the mood of the story, that animation has in the decades since taken on a certain folkish charm. The hand-painted backdrops and fluid character of the art, the exaggerated body shapes, just the general human craft present in the cel animation process. In its every frame it is an artefact of another era, one marked by a newness and a mystique towards the unknown not completely dissimilar to the enigmatic world of Sleepy Hollow, Tarry Town, and those other such secluded glens of up-state New York and New England described so aptly by Irving. At the very least you can trace the lineage of this short back about twenty years to Disney’s spooky cartoons of the 1920s, with the ghosts and dancing skeletons and the like.
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Disney actually had a very good relationship with ghostly subject matter back in these early days, when animation was expected to appeal to adults as much as children and the homogenized Walt Disney brand had not come into existence yet. In fact, what we would now identify as Halloween themes and iconography appear regularly throughout the Silly Symphonies cartoons that ran through the 1930s –light-hearted in nature, but with a certain creeping look and atmosphere: Hell’s Bells, Babes in the Woods, The Old Mill. And these would inform the certain darkness that characterized the studio’s early features like Snow White and Pinocchio and ultimately Sleepy Hollow -where it is most thematically prominent.
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The creatives at Disney definitely seemed to understand the source text when they wrote, storyboarded, and animated this film, particularly with regards to its ghostly character. Everything in the movie up to the point where Ichabod leaves the Van Tassel’s home is fairly well done and charming for its pastoral aesthetics and cartoon jocularity -which is there in the original story too, down to Brom Bones’ pranks and the dog in particular. The animators have a lot of fun especially with Ichabod’s ridiculous spindly physicality, contrasting it in fun cartoon ways with the burliness of Brom Bones -the courtship sequence is as fun as any Looney Tunes bit. Though eeriness does not pervade the film as it does the story, it make a sharp entrance once the harvest feast is arrived at, and Brom’s song of “The Headless Horseman” brings to the table that haunting quality; the frenzied movement of the dance in concert with Ichabod’s terror boiling over makes for some great foreshadowing of what’s to come- it’s one of the best musical sequences of this era of Disney.
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It preps the creeping mood effectively of the focal part of the story -the haunting and pursuit by the Headless Horseman himself as Ichabod travels the lonely road through the overbearing woods home. Irving’s book is incredibly meticulous in its detail here, and the movie replicates that in its attention to the darkness and the sounds that play tricks with Ichabod’s nerves -to pretty frightful effect (such as the frog croaking “Headless Horseman” not long after what is effectively a jump scare with a tree that looks like a phantom). Crosby’s narration is largely cut out here too, allowing that mood to speak for itself. The sequence is dotted by little bits of humour in Ichabod’s reaction to it all -yet it is an unsettling kind of humour, mixed with something deranged. It stalls out Ichabod’s time on the road and lulls the audience into a false sense of security. And it is after all in the relieved, hysterical laughing of Ichabod and Gunpowder that the Headless Horseman makes his first appearance -with his own laugh, another departure from the very stoic, impenetrable figure of the story, but one that fits this tone with its own level of scary mystery.
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Subsequently, the chase is thrilling, even as it too is broken up by gags like Ichabod winding up on the horse with the Horseman -these bits do delineate the horror somewhat- but the music and the pacing keep up the formidable momentum until Ichabod does finally cross that bridge, after many a detour and reversal. When the Horseman throws the flaming pumpkin head at him it is still a chilling effect, and an image I’ve not forgotten. It may not illicit quite the same dread as the story, but there is a certain immediate crushing horror to it nonetheless.
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Of course, the movie tempers as best it can the story’s brief epilogue, making sure to include the insinuation that Ichabod had survived, and punctuating the chilling ending with a reprise of the upbeat part of the “Headless Horseman” song. Also omitted is the speculation that Brom himself had something to do with Ichabod’s disappearing and the general gossiping amongst the townsfolk. There are various important things missing from this adaptation, the character of the denizens of Sleepy Hollow probably the most prominent. Though they are mostly nameless, their caution-heavy superstitious nature informs a lot of the richness to Ichabod’s experiences in the village -replaced here by merely a gaggle of prospective women (including the comical short one) and Brom’s admiring posse; with this nothing of the creeping set-up is maintained until the fateful night. Also notably absent is the dour circumstances Ichabod left the feast in, Katrina having rejected him, making the journey home that much more grim. Beyond mere adaptational changes though, the film does feel like a compromise in terms of its tone -going far into the silly whimsy of the first two acts to even out the dread later on; and the songs that accompany Ichabod and Katrina aren’t particularly good either.
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Nonetheless, this short can’t escape the distinction that it is about the only Disney movie that ends in the probable death of its protagonist. It doesn’t sanitize near as much as it might decades later -even by the 1960s I couldn’t see Disney attempting to adapt so bleak a story. And a story that it is fairly faithful to, and largely entertaining in the parts where it’s not. The brevity is also a virtue. Other versions seem obligated to fill out the story with additional material or motivation or explanation. But it is meant to be a short tale, and one that is conveyed best through the language of unspoken words, of mood more than character. It is a hard thing to adapt right, and Disney perplexingly, wonderfully managed to come close.
The best way to experience the story is still Irving’s original text, as haunting and chilling to read now as it was two hundred years ago. Any resurrected version made by anyone other than maybe Robert Eggers likely wouldn’t capture the soul of the story the way Disney did -and even they only got part of the way there. It is still one of the most captivating works of nineteenth century literature, and this Halloween I’ll be reading it again. But maybe I’ll also be looking again at that Disney film for its charming and even singularly scary take on this ever enduring Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
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