25 Years Ago, Sleepy Hollow Gave Us Peak Tim Burton Aesthetic

Every major director has an aesthetic all their own. Some are more chameleonic, some are nearly invisible, but if you watch enough of their films, you’ll see it. Whether we’re talking about the symmetrical wonder of Wes Anderson or the gritty precision of David Fincher, everyone’s got a style.

Then there’s Tim Burton.

Burton is certainly not the first filmmaker to become a Brand, but over the last 30 years he’s arguably the director whose visual style has most permeated our culture in terms of sheer aesthetic force. In the 21st century, Tim Burton is not just a director who makes visually distinct, successful movies and TV series. Tim Burton is an entire line of merchandise ranging from Edward Scissorhands to Wednesday. His work fills bedrooms, living rooms, Halloween lawn displays, and entire Hot Topic locations stacked to the rafters with Jack Skellingtons and Beetlejuices.

But for all the casual, ubiquitous celebration of the quirks and fascinations of Burton’s filmography in pop culture, the film that’s the clearest distillation of his modern Goth aesthetic in all its forms is often still left out in the cold. Edward Scissorhands, Beetlejuice, Batman Returns, and of course The Nightmare Before Christmas (which he conceived but, to be clear, did not direct; thank Henry Selick for that gem) have spawned legions of merch-sporting fans and home decor schemes, but 1999’s Sleepy Hollow has historically not run with that pack. And that’s a shame, because as the film turns 25 this year, it’s clearer and clearer that Sleepy Hollow might just be the Most Tim Burton Movie that Tim Burton has ever made.

Set in New York on the cusp of the 19th century, Burton’s adaptation of Washington Irving’s legendary tale of the Headless Horseman centers on detective Ichabod Crane (Johnny Depp), who’s been sent to the title village with the aim of solving a series of murders. Ichabod is devoted to solving crimes through modern science, to gadgets and theories and expert detection over stuffier, older ways of thinking. He’s also a fraidy-cat who can barely stand the sight of blood, which means that when he starts looking at the decapitated bodies littered around Sleepy Hollow, he’s more than a little squeamish.

He’s also, crucially, absolutely aghast at the idea that the town elders (played by an all-star ensemble that includes Ian McDiarmid, Michael Gambon, and Jeffrey Jones) are ready to pin the whole thing on a mythical Hessian ghost (Christopher Walken) rather than a garden variety murderer with a clear modus operandi. But Sleepy Hollow is steeped in superstition and legend, and the sooner Ichabod understands that, the closer to the real killer he’ll get.

So, why does this story emerge as the perfect distillation of Tim Burton’s aesthetic? Well, for one thing, just look at it. Together with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (a three-time Oscar winner who got his second nomination for this film), and production designer Rick Heinrichs (who won an Oscar for this film), Burton makes Sleepy Hollow into a world of viscous fog and deep, nuanced grays. The sun never quite shines all the way in this haunted vision of post-Revolution America. It’s a world in perpetual twilight, a liminal space between one era and the next, between superstition and science, and for Ichabod Crane, between fear and the truth. It’s all wonderfully Gothic and moody, and it serves the story of a small town full of secrets quite well, but it’s not the whole picture.

Character is often just as important to Burton’s aesthetic success as visuals, and here he once again weaves the story of an oddball outcast into a saga of thrilling contrast and dark humor. Contrast is vital to Burton’s films, whether we’re talking about the bright suburbia of Edward Scissorhands or the cockeyed optimism within Ed Wood or Big Fish, he’s always pushing back against darkness, cynicism, and doubt with something lighter, and in Sleepy Hollow that comes through Ichabod himself. A pale-faced, black-haired, energetic young thinker clad in black, Depp’s Ichabod might as well be a stand-in for Burton himself, because he’s a guy who simply sees the world differently from everyone else. He’s skittish, and academic, and often nakedly vulnerable amid the more macho, self-sufficient Colonial types dotting the film, but he’s also laser-focused on a truth he’s been chasing since his childhood, and a need to make sense of the world the only way he knows how. The culture clash between Ichabod’s science-based thinking and the town’s superstition makes for wonderful comedy throughout the film, as does Ichabod’s frequent collisions with the grotesque, but it also all comes together in the end as the young detective is forced to merge the old with the new to make sense of the Headless Horseman as an entity. So many of Burton’s films are about the fantastical encroaching on the mundane, and in Sleepy Hollow, he’s able to blend the two in arguably the most successful thematic marriage in his entire career.

But all of this is secondary to what, to me, feels like the most crucial stylistic decision at work in Sleepy Hollow, something that’s present in Burton’s other most successful aesthetic leaps and runs through even his most naturalistic films. Throughout his entire career, Burton has been fascinated by the ways in which artifice and reality can merge on a movie screen. Like Hitchcock before him and Wes Anderson after him, he’s a filmmaker in love with the idea that he can curate and create every single element onscreen, to constantly remind the viewers that they’re watching a movie packed with production details and nevertheless sweep them away with his narrative. Sleepy Hollow could have taken on a much grittier, naturalistic feel, full of location shooting and note-perfect period details, but that’s not the Tim Burton way. Instead, the film is rich in the gorgeous artifice of soundstages, bug-eyed creatures, and contraptions straight out of Edward Scissorhands’ house on the hill. The look of the film is distinctly inspired, right down to individual shots, by Burton influences like Terence Fisher’s Hammer Horror films and Mario Bava’s Black Sunday, all films that made excellent use of the artifice of moviemaking, whether that means a stagecoach chase on a soundstage or visuals arranged in haunting, arch tableaus.

This sense of beauty in the artifice, of conjuring meaning out of something that’s clearly been staged for our pleasure and was never meant to evoke absolute reality, is a preoccupation of Burton’s entire career, and with Sleepy Hollow, he was able to push that to places he never had before. The film’s soundstage-laden look, coupled with its character quirks and sumptuous Gothic darkness, makes it a perfect distillation of the Burton style. It’s beloved, yes, but 25 years on, it’s clearer than ever that Burton’s approach to Sleepy Hollow made it not just good, but one of his best, and as the Tim Burton brand continues to saturate the culture, it deserves to be remembered that way.

Matthew Jackson is a pop culture writer and nerd-for-hire who’s been writing about entertainment for more than a decade. His writing about movies, TV, comics, and more regularly appears at SYFY WIRE, Looper, Mental Floss, Decider, BookPage, and other outlets. He lives in Austin, Texas, and when he’s not writing he’s usually counting the days until Christmas.