There is so little resemblance between the film Sleepy Hollow and the story by Washington Irving that it is pointless to compare them. I recently saw it on television, and it is one of the better horror films because of its sustained atmosphere of sinister doom. It is also a revealing window into Hollywood’s soul.
Ichabod Crane is a constable in New York, at odds with his fellow police because he wants to introduce scientific methods into detection. “We have to change. Soon we will be living in the 19th century.”
To demonstrate what Ichabod is up against, the film takes the poetic license of showing accused criminals actually being tortured in the courtroom during their trials, although torture had been abolished everywhere in the Western world by l799 and had never been inflicted in the courtroom itself.
Ichabod is sent by his annoyed superiors to a village called Sleepy Hollow, the abode of old Dutch families, where there has been a series of grisly murders. Here his vaunted methods will themselves be on trial.
Ichabod arrives eager to play the city slicker. The villagers whisper that the murderer is the Headless Horseman, the ghost of a Hessian soldier killed in the Revolution, but Ichabod scoffs and assures them that it is a human being whom his methods will unmask.
But the murders continue, and as Ichabod probes deeper and deeper he realizes that there are indeed supernatural forces at work, that the Horseman is controlled by someone who stole the murderer’s own head from his grave and thereby can get the Horseman to decapitate others and ride off with their heads.
Meanwhile Ichabod is having nightmares, which eventually coalesce to the point where he remembers that, when he was a child, his father murdered his mother because she was a witch.
Ichabod’s methods have only marginal use in unraveling the mystery, and in the end he wins only by turning the magic against itself.
Whatever the filmmakers may have intended, this is an interesting manifestation of the “post-modernist” mentality, a kind of allegory that should be remembered as exactly mirroring some of the fashionable beliefs of our age.
Ichabod lives at the tail end of the Enlightenment, the movement that proclaimed that reason alone was a sure guide to truth and that bowed to the authority of science. But Ichabod’s shallow rationalism is soon exposed as illusory, a defense mechanism against the dark deeds that occurred in his childhood. In good Freudian fashion, he experiences “recovered memory syndrome”
His father had to murder his mother rather than have her executed because one of the Enlightenment’s boasts was that it had abolished witch prosecutions, the very idea of witchcraft being a superstition. But in the film there are real witches, evil and not so evil, perhaps a bow towards today’s fashionable cult of “wicca,” the (false) claim that there are women who follow a benign, thousands-of-years-old magical cult.
But if the supernatural has been rehabilitated, it provides no benefit to Christianity. The clergymen in the film — Ichabod's father (Episcopalian, judging from his vestments) and the pastor of Sleepy Hollow — are both hypocritical and malevolent.
At a crucial moment the villagers gather in church, but they are hysterical and find no peace in their faith. When the Horseman appears, pandemonium ensues in the church, and at one point the evil minister brains someone with a cross. The symbolism could scarcely be more obvious — the
Christian faith, far from being an antidote to evil, simply perpetrates its own evil (another instance of poetic license — I doubt if Dutch Reformed churches had crosses of any kind in l799).
It is of course a mistake to read too much significance into a mere entertainment. But I think we see here the half-formulated “New Age” outlook of some of our more sophisticated contemporaries, people who want the excitement which comes with the supernatural but not the “rigidity” of the Christian faith which is the supernatural’s true home.
(This article courtesy of the Arlington Catholic Herald.)
