Washington Irving’s short story from 1820 is often credited with having a lasting influence over modern popular culture…it's one of the earliest examples of American Gothic literature (aligning folklore and the supernatural in a way that set it apart from its European cousins) and some even cite it as the originator of the Halloween icon, the carved pumpkin.
And given its dearth of mainstream cinematic adaptations over the years, the rise in popularity of the new horror gothic of the 90s (see Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) and the technology available to finally realise its iconic antagonist, 1999 was the perfect time for the arbiter of all thing’s cinematic gothic, Tim Burton, to deliver us a new retelling of the Legend of Sleepy Hollow…
At the turn of the 19th century, New York police constable Ichabod Crane (Johnny Depp) is summoned to the New England hamlet of Sleepy Hollow to investigate a spate of brutal decapitations. Once there, he’s unsure what’s worse…the hideously convoluted machinations of the village elders and their political backstabbing…or the headless horseman at loose in the woods, collecting the heads of others in the vain hope of finding his own…
A quick scan of the credits will throw up a litany of wonderful genre names – Burton directing, Se7en’s Andrew Kevin Walker scripting from a story co-written by SFX legend Kevin Yagher and Master of the Bizarre Danny Elfman scoring, even Francis Ford Coppola on Exec Producing duty – and as expected, their creation is a beautiful blend of all of their own gothic influences. Striking a near perfect balance between the grandiose European gothicery of classic period Hammer and Roger Corman’s AIP more surreal gothics, heavily inspired by Americana and its own mix of the heady and the mundane, the tone and feel of Sleepy Hollow is like a warm hug and a mug of cocoa for fans of these 60s and 70s horror cinema classics.
Stunningly realised by Production Designer Rick Heinrichs and shot by Emmanuel Lubezki, the high contrast, bleached images that feel drained of all but the barest hint of colour conjure the glorious black and white images of the past and on its looks alone, it’s a stunningly evocative and nostalgic throwback to a time that at the turn of the 21st century felt all but forgotten. However Kevin Walker’s script intertwines with the visuals on an almost genetic level, conjuring up a script and a set of characters that are plucked straight out of a Count’s castle or the House of Usher…the plot is almost impossibly convoluted and at times makes random leaps and discoveries to keep its machinations going for as long as possible; yet this is also a trope of its cinematic influences, more interested in character and spectacle than the vagaries of a cohesive story.
...a high camp and bloody romp that feels exactly like the film that Hammer and AIP would have made had they still been around...
Johnny Depp is in full on Jack Sparrow Practice Mode with his divisive Ichabod Crane, at times supernaturally gifted in his scientific deductions, and at others painfully camp and overtly comedic, but without him, the film would feel a little too like its progenitors and his gleeful streak of humour ups the whimsey just perfectly. The rest of the cast is a gluttony of riches, with almost every British character actor around deployed as part of the village hierarchy – from Michael Gambon to Ian McDiarmid, from Richard Griffiths to Miranda Richardson and even a couple of more specific nods to Hammer yet again, with the wonderful Christopher Lee and Michael Gough, all have gravitas and a riotous energy to their performances, plugging straight into the tone of the film and bringing that vibe to a perfectly formed life. Christina Ricci fits nicely alongside these heavyweights as the ethereal and mysterious Katrina Van Tassel and while a little simpering at times, it perfectly suits the character and her place in the ensemble; while Christopher Walken (when he has a head) and Ray Park (when he doesn’t) as the Hessian Horseman is a charismatic and muscular antagonist, as nimble with a duo of axes as he is with a razor toothed grin.
Yet so slavishly sticking to its roots does open the film up to a dose of criticism – it engages in flights of fancy that feel random and serve no place within the story (Depp’s flashback scenes add little to Crane’s character and in an uncharitable light could be seen as an excuse to shoehorn muse Lisa Marie into the film somehow); whilst the plot itself seems overly complex and drawn out, shoving certain characters – Casper Van Dien’s chisel-jawed himbo notably – to one side in favour of adding yet another layer of subterfuge that now has to involve EVERYONE in the village.
However, all of that can be easily overlooked as the viewer just wallows in the glorious gothic nostalgia of it all. Modern technology has been tastefully used to not just finally realise the horseman properly without his head (although there are glimpses of its rubbery overuse at the odd time) but to better realise its own past, the sets and locations blurring into one but never forgetting the stage bound aesthetic of its roots; and Elfman just gets the hairs on the back of the arm standing on end with his wonderful atmospheric soundtrack that layers memorable themes on top of a sense of rich foreboding and mystery.
A lovely ode to a rich vein in horror cinema’s heritage, Burton’s Sleepy Hollow is a supreme gothic dream of a nightmare, a high camp and bloody romp that feels exactly like the film that Hammer and AIP would have made had they still been around at the tail end of the 20th century. And for this horror fan, there can be no bigger compliment…
Sleep Hollow 4K Video
Note: screenshots in this review are NOT taken from the 4K UHD blu-ray and are illustrative only.
A new restoration from the original 35mm camera negative has been delivered by Paramount, although information on what exactly was undertaken is thin on the ground. What we do know is that underlying restoration has produced a mostly gorgeous native 3,840 x 2,160 image in a 1.85:1 aspect ratio (NOT the 1.78:1 aspect ratio of the 1080p releases) that also utilises 10-bit video depth, WCG and both main HDR grades (HDR10 and Dolby Vision), and has been encoded using the HEVC/H.265 video codec.
Note: the film has had a staggering number of releases over the years so it's worth noting that the accompanying 1080p blu-ray in this set is NOT the previous UK Optimum disc from 2009, it is apparently the 2020 20th anniversary German blu-ray that was subsequently released in the UK by Paramount in early 2022. This means that it does NOT include the new 4K restoration used on the UHD and that the 1080p SDR blu-ray retains that release’s aspect ratio of 1.78:1.
For a film who’s heavily stylized visuals play such an important role in establishing its atmosphere, this 4K disc had a job on its hands…heavy grain, high contrast semi-bleached colour palette…it’s proven a torture test for previous releases…however this new 4K disc significantly improves over those 1080p versions in every conceivable way…even if it's not quite as perfect as it maybe could have been.
Immediately apparent is the finer grain field and texture in this new 4K image…however there are some instances where the grain looks oddly smooth and almost removed. For the most part though, gone is the splotchy, overly digitised look of the grain on previous releases, replaced here by an even, finer grain field that showcases a greater degree of fine detail lurking in its depths. For those few instances where the grain does disappear, it does look like some form of digital grain manipulation has indeed been applied – instances such as the dream sequence with the white room and red door have their backgrounds be almost completely smooth. However, these scenes also coincide with a significant drop in bit rate, also hinting at a less than stellar encode being behind these smoothed out images...more on that below. And even more interesting to note is that this scene in particular is a dream sequence which has a much more woozy and evocative look to it than the rest of the film...so is the smoothness here intentional? Different stock? Lighting? Is it the use of optical transitions into the scene that's causing this? Who knows...but for the vast majority of the film's run-time, the grain field is now significantly better resolved, offering up a much more natural and filmic texture to the picture.
...the improvement in all areas of the image over the previous releases are significant...
This better resolution of the film's inherent grain structure leaves the way open for a significant uptick in fine detail that’s now apparent across the image. Lines are clean and sharp, textures across clothes, faces and sets are nuanced and wonderfully delineated and the picture has an overall crispness that the best 4K restorations demonstrate. Sharpness now feels much more natural thanks to finer details such as wrinkles on faces now being much more visible to the viewer than they were previously, delivering an immeasurably less processed picture than my previous version. And even where the grain does appear to have gone AWOL, there’s still a greater degree of fine detail visible in the image, a sure sign of the size of the upgrade in terms of the overall clarity of visible detail.
This ‘naturalising’ of the image also carries over into the new colour grade, which is supported by the enhanced WCG and the HDR grades. Overall, the image looks a touch warmer and slightly darker than the previous release for the most part – this is most obvious in skin tones which now have more colour saturation in them and less ghostly pallor, now making them actually look like skin. There’s a much greater range of colour now present – previous images had a stark, ‘digital’ look to them which has thankfully been tamed and replaced with a much more shaded and organic look, all the more obvious in the areas of more overt colour splashes such as the exploding windmill at the end of the film (the explosion now has a real fiery look to it thanks to the presence of significantly richer oranges and yellows). And perhaps most importantly for the film, this also carries on over to the many dark scenes, with a much higher degree of detail now visible in the shadows, whereby previously these had been little more than slabs of blocky colouring.
The restoration has also removed the slight judder noted in the previous Optimum release, this new image remaining rock solid throughout. Finally, the compression utilises an average bit rate of the low to mid 70s mbps that seems to do a mostly decent enough job with all that tricky grain...however at times it drops to single digit figures, possibly to cope with the reduced bandwidth needed for that particular image...or possibly the cause of the less than perfect grain reproduction of that specific scene...hmmm. However despite these moments, the overall quality of this 4K restoration is suitably high.
It's such a tricky task for a film with such a heavily stylized look to try and get a handle on whether or not this new disc is capturing the exact image the director was going for. However given the comparison to the previous 2009 release, and even with those caveats around some potential grain management applied or a patchy encode, the improvement in all the other areas of the image over the previous releases is significant, significant enough to be really pleased with the overall picture quality.
We reviewed the region free UK Ultra HD Blu-ray release of Sleepy Hollow on a JVC-DLA N5 Ultra HD 4K projector and a Panasonic DP-UB820 4K UHD player.
Sleepy Hollow 4K Audio
The following audio tracks are available on the 4K disc:
- English DTS-HD MA 5.1
- German and French Dolby Digital 5.1
- Japanese Dolby Digital 2.0
- English Audio Description (Dolby Digital 5.1)
Subtitles included are:
- English
- English Hard of Hearing
- German
- Spanish
- French
- Italian
- Japanese
A quick comparison of two of the films more aurally exciting scenes between this 4K and the previous Optimum disc show that this is NOT the same DTS-HD MA 5.1 track that had appeared on the previous release.
On this new 4K, overall audio fidelity is fantastic, with a dynamic range that veers from whisper quiet to explosively loud in an instant. Every sound from the piercing clanging of weapons, to the booming hoof crashes of the horseman’s steed, and everything in between is rendered with absolute precision and clarity. Bass is at times incredibly deep, while the mid-range seems impressively wide without sounding muddy and the top-end is crystal sharp without ever coming across as harsh or shrill.
...a gloriously thunderous listen...
Surround usage is fun and enveloping at times, although not quite as constant as I would have liked (more a fault with the original mix than the transfer of it to disc methinks), with some at times outrageously aggressive spot effects - mostly the cacophany of those gigantic hooves - adding to the overall atmospheric nature of the track. The front speaker array is wide and gets the lions share of the work to do with the soundtrack, with pans across and between all speakers smooth and seamless, creating a naturally wide soundfield that balances the complex mix of bombastic orchestral score and wide-ranging sound effects nigh on perfectly.
Dialogue is locked to the centre channel and is perfectly clear and prioritised well in the mix, which overall is nicely lively and suitably grandiose. In comparison to the previous 5.1 mix, this track is weightier, with much more low end heft, and has a much more aggressive feel to it - both in terms of scale and volume, giving this new release a slight but audible audio upgrade, even without a new 3D remix. A gloriously thunderous listen…
We reviewed the region free UK Ultra HD Blu-ray release of Sleepy Hollow on a Denon AVR4300 and a 7.2.4 array of Kef speakers (including the Q range and ci in-walls/in-ceilings).
Sleepy Hollow 4K extras
The extras listed below are on the 1080p SDR blu-ray, with nothing on the 4K UHD disc:
- Sleepy Hollow: Behind the Legend (legacy) – a look behind the scenes of the making of the film (30 mins)
- Reflections on Sleep Hollow (legacy) – further behind the scenes interviews with cast and crew (11 mins)
For all the effort that Paramount muster for their new transfers, it’s a shame the same can’t be applied for the supplemental features, a lazy port of two EPK-style featurettes that graced the original US blu-ray back in 2006 and originated even further back from the film’s DVD release.
Both here are lightweight fluff, shot from the original press materials, only interested in selling the film and the experience of working on it. In this mature age of physical media, neither are worthy of your time.
What’s even worse is that other extras exist – Tum Burton recorded a commentary track for example – that are now not included here. Why? You’ll have to ask Paramount. But this is a real disappointment, even with the previous Optimum disc having no special features whatsoever.
Note: as well as a regular amaray edition, there’s also a handsome steelbook edition (it’s a different kind of steelbook however – a fabelo steelbook, like a cross between a steelbook and a mediabook) that also comes with a printed version of the original short story included as an off-disc extra. Do note though that this steelbook release stacks the UHD and blu-rays on top of each other unlike the amaray, so pay close attention to packaging preferences.
Conclusion
Sleepy Hollow 4K Blu-ray Review
For fans of the very best of gothic horror cinema, Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow remains a wonderful throwback, birthed by a genuine love of the genre and realised with a gorgeously nostalgic vibe. Its high camp tone and gloriously over-designed theatrical art design combine to deliver a beautiful homage to the Hammer and Roger Corman gothic classics of the 1960s.
Paramount’s new 4K restoration is mostly a superb refresh of the highly stylized art direction, with only a handful of grain/DNR issues and that keen sense of delivering a look of yesteryear holding it back from true visual splendour. And even though the audio also receives a small but definite upgrade in terms of its new 5.1 soundtrack, the sheen is taken off the package somewhat by giving us a barely worth bothering with set of extra features. For most however, the significant visual and slight aural upgrade will be more than enough to recommend picking this new 4K version up as the best version of the film to view in the home.
Video Review
Sleepy Hollow is on 4K Ultra HD™ Standard and Steelbook releases from Paramount Home Video and is available now.
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