Hollow opens with a fast, bumpy stagecoach ride through the woods near Albany, New York. The passenger (an uncredited Martin Landau) peeks his head out, notices that the driver no longer has his, and leaps from the moving carriage. As he runs through the woods and into a cornfield, the man comes across a creepy scarecrow that could be an early ancestor of Burton’s Jack Skellington. Terrified, he stops, turns and is decapitated by a headless horseman.

Flash to a 1799 New York City courthouse, where the judge impatiently listens to Constable Ichabod Crane’s (Johnny Depp, The Astronaut’s Wife) customary lecture about the importance of collecting evidence from the scenes of crimes in order to fairly prosecute guilty parties. Tired of his liberal thinking, the judge sends Crane to investigate three bizarre murders in an isolated Dutch farming community called Sleepy Hollow in Upstate New York. So Crane, somewhat of a forefather of modern forensic science, packs his bags with strange chemicals and what looks to be nightmarish homemade dental tools.

Once he arrives in Sleepy Hollow, the town’s leaders give Crane the lowdown on the murders. Each victim was beheaded, but the heads were never found. Worse yet, Crane learns that the killer is believed to be the ghost of a Hessian trooper (Christopher Walken, Blast From the Past) who was himself beheaded twenty years earlier, leaving his spectre to ride a mighty black steed through the West Woods in a nightly quest for his skull. Crane, a weak-hearted ‘fraidy cat prone to fainting spells, realizes he may be in way over his head.

There are a few sticky points, namely the inclusion of Crane’s nightmare flashbacks to his childhood, where his buxom mother (Lisa Marie) dabbled in witchcraft. This appears to be added only to show off Marie’s fantastic rack – she’s Burton’s real-life girlfriend and has appeared in his last few films. But this transgression can easily be overlooked, however, because…well, because of the aforementioned rack. Burton’s film seems pretty true to its source, right down to Katrina Van Tassel’s (Christina Ricci, The Opposite of Sex) "plump as a partridge" stature to the name of Crane’s dusty horse (Gunpowder). Burton even one-ups his predecessor, using the twisted, gnarled limbs of The Tree of the Dead as the Horseman’s home.

The major change to Irving’s work concerns Crane. In the book he was a kindly schoolteacher and musician, and is physically described as follows:

"He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels and his whole frame most loosely hung together. His head was small, and flat at top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so that it looked like a weathercock perched upon his spindle neck to tell which way the wind blew. To see him striding along the profile of a hill on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and fluttering about him, one might have mistaken him for the genius of famine descending upon the earth, or some scarecrow eloped from a cornfield. His sharp elbows stuck out like grasshoppers'."

Doesn’t exactly make you think of Johnny Depp, does it? Howard Stern, maybe, but not Johnny Depp. Irving’s remarkably vivid representation of the protagonist stood out in my memory more than any other part of the original work - it’s probably the best description I’ve ever read. In the text, the Horseman’s cranium was blasted off by a cannonball in a nameless Revolutionary War battle. Interestingly, the script does include a "woman in white" that lived in the haunted woods, referring to one of the many legends Irving’s townsfolk believed in his story.

In Irving’s account, the story was told first-person after Crane’s encounter with the Headless Horseman. Here, Burton and his writers (Andrew Kevin Walker of Se7en fame and special-effects specialist Kevin Yagher) have made the film into more of a Scooby-Doo murder-mystery, and the baddie is nearly as easy to finger. For a few minutes in this film, it seemed like the Horseman was turning into an unstoppable clichéd modern horror figure, like Freddie or Jason. The Horseman’s battle with Crane and Brom Van Brunt (Casper Van Dien, The Omega Code) easily puts any skirmish in The World is Not Enough to shame.

Indescribably beautiful, from Danny Elfman’s score to Emmanuel Lubezki’s (Meet Joe Black) amazing cinematography to the breathtaking technical design work from the team responsible for Fargo, Kafka, Aliens and Gattaca, Burton’s film captures the mood and feel of Irving’s short right down to the eerie wooden bridge and the perpetual fog that seems to constantly roll through the gloomy town. And you can’t help but think about Burton’s Gotham in Batman when Hollow shows a view of 1799 New York City.

As a side note, the closing credits list a Conrad Hall as the director of photography for the New York unit of the film crew. The same Conrad Hall that was nominated for Best Cinematography at last year’s Oscars (for A Civil Action), as well as an early favorite for this year’s ceremony (American Beauty).  It turns out Lubezki did reshoots on Hall's A Civil Action, while Hall returned the favor in Hollow.

1:42 - for graphic horror violence and gore, multiple beheadings and mild adult situations