The film Sleepy Hollow has been directed by Tim Burton in 1 999. What makes it a gothic film?

Tim Burton is an American film maker born in 1958. He realizes films but also cartoons that take place in morbid environments. Specialized in the gothic genre, he is famous for his ghoulish but fantasy films that mix horrible and humorous items. He frequently caricatures gothic elements, which make his films have a touch of dark humour. He has often worked with the actors Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter. His works are recognizable because of the thin and pale face of the characters, especially in his cartoons.

He directed the fantasy horror film Sleepy Hollow in 1999. Adapted from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irwin, the story is about a raw investigator, Ichabod Crane, who has just arrived in Sleepy Hollow, New York and is directly embroiled at a gruesome puzzle sustained by all the people : some of them are mysteriously decapitated. Ichabod has to find out who is the murderer by digging out old forgotten calamities that occurred decades ago.

The story takes place in an isolated village of the eighteenth century, plunged from start to finish in the fog. There is a dark forest where the trees have no leaf and look parched. Ichabod Crane is a tall and thin man with messy hair. He is marginal and frightening, he is introduced as a man who blows in someone's ear to speak to that person and he is not afraid to carry out an autopsy on a corpse at a period in which it is considered as blasphemous.

The mood of the story is disturbing : the characters look all really weird and suspicious, blame each other. The director did not try to hide the people that are beheaded, and some of the inhabitants make tasteless jokes about all the murders.

There is a growing sense of suspense from the beginning to the end : we see each time a bit better the headless rider, and each Ichabod's progress in his investigation seems to complicate it even more.

The recurrent elements of the gothic are the place, with the isolated village and the dark woods; the characters, with a weak and young woman that pass out; the fact that there is a supernatural creature, a more dead than alive, to eliminate. Plus there are three women who are or try to be witches and play with occult forces.

The story is about powerful witches who are beneficial or evil, about an old psychotic murderer who get of his grave to obey to someone who has stolen the head of his corpse : the plot is imaginary because of its preternatural dimensions. But it is also full of elements such as a young orphan who is not helped by the inhabitants when he loses his father, or as the complexity of the relationships between people that could not be seen during the end of the twentieth century but are shown there.

Sleepy Hollow is a gothic film because of its plot and of its setting, but also by its characters and by the influence of its director.