with nightmares.”^18 Sleepy Hollowis clearly a closed
film that depicts a singular, self-enclosed world in
which almost everyone and everything are held in
the grip of powerful personal, societal, and super-
natural forces. Director Tim Burton is of course the
strongest, most controlling force in this world.
To create this gloomy atmosphere, Burton and
his collaborators use a muted, even drab, color
palette, punctuated here and there by carefully
placed bright details. (The only consistent devia-
tion is in the sequences depicting Crane’s dreams
of his mother.) As the movie begins with prologue
and title credits, however, the dominant color is not
muted, but the red of dripping wax being used to
seal a last will and testament—a red so evocative
that we momentarily mistake it for blood. After
sealing his will, Peter Van Garrett (Martin Landau,
in an uncredited performance), a pale figure wear-
ing a pale yellow silk jacket, flees by carriage with
the Headless Horseman in pursuit. The Horseman
lops off the head of the coachman and then of Van
Garrett, whose blood spatters all over an eerie
orange pumpkin head mounted on a stake. Decapi-
tation, a central theme of Sleepy Hollow, produces
lots of blood, and blood continually spurts through-
out the movie in the murders committed by the
Horseman as well as in self-inflicted wounds and
the gory examinations of dead bodies.
As Ichabod Crane travels by a closed, black car-
riage between New York City and Sleepy Hollow in
the opening scene of the film, we are introduced to
the principal color palette of late fall and early win-
ter: gray river, gray wintry skies, trees almost bar-
ren of leaves, and rime on the ground. As day turns
to twilight, Crane arrives at the village entrance,
marked by two pillars topped by stone stags’ heads,
and walks down the road through the village and
across the fields to the Van Tassel mansion. The
entire scene appears to have been shot in black and
white, rather than color, for Crane’s extremely pale
face provides the only color here, signifying, as we
have already learned in theory but will now learn in
fact, that the townspeople are drained of all life by
their fear of the Horseman. Completely skeptical of
what he considers the “myth” of the Horseman,
Crane wears black and looks pallid, perturbed, and
wary throughout the early part of the movie.
The village, the movie’s most elaborate outdoor
set, was constructed in England in a style that Hein-
richs calls “Colonial Expressionism”; it includes a
covered wooden bridge, church, general store, mid-
wife’s office, tavern, notary public, blacksmith, bank,
mill house, warehouses, and several residences.
Even the houses are scary, with their gray facades,
doors, and shutters. Recalling English and Dutch
architecture of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, many of these exteriors were also dupli-
cated inside London studios, where heavy layers of
artificial fog and smoke and controlled lighting
helped create the illusion of a dark, misty valley
under a leaden sky.
This meticulously created mise-en-scène encour-
ages us not only to escape into the past but also to
suspend our disbelief. On this ground, two worlds
collide: one is represented by Crane, a “modern”
criminal investigator using the latest technology
(most of it of his own invention); the other is repre-
sented by the community of Sleepy Hollow, which
itself ranges from the rich to the poor, all afraid of
the Headless Horseman. Burton tells the story in
part through fantastic objects and details, includ-
ing Crane’s notebook containing his drawings and
notes, various forensic instruments, and peculiar
eyeglasses; Katrina’s book of witchcraft and evil-
eye diagrams, over which an ominous spider
creeps; the fairy-tale witch’s cave deep in the forest
and her potions made of bats’ heads and birds’
wings; the mechanical horse used to propel the
Horseman through the village and surrounding
woods; the “Tree of Death,” where the Horseman
lives between murders; the windmill, where he
almost meets his end; and the fountain of blood at
the climactic moment, when the Horseman’s head
is restored to him and he returns to life. Impres-
sionist, even expressionist, much of what we see in
this creepy place, with its frightening inhabitants
and their eccentric costumes and hairstyles, was
created through special effects.
Although it is necessary to be precise in analyz-
ing all of the design elements in a single scene or214 CHAPTER 5 MISE-EN-SCÈNE
(^18) Rick Heinrichs, qtd. in Denise Abbott, “Nightmare by
Design,” Hollywood Reporter, international ed., 361, no. 49
(February 29–March 6, 2000):S-6.