Icha-bod…. Icha-bod…. Icha-bod….

No piece of Halloween-themed cinema made a more significant impression on me than the animated 1949 Walt Disney rendition of "Sleepy Hollow," and I am not sure if there is anyone else, of any age, who is any different. The fact that I grew up in a place very similar to upstate New York might contribute to this, however– a sleepy town very much like the hollow in the story, full of hill top cemeteries and winding wooded roads. I recall bits and pieces of the first three quarters of the movie, but only vaguely; the school teacher walking into town with his face in a book; holding an apple; attending a party…but the last quarter of the story, like most people I imagine, has been seared into my memory, scene for scene– the hollow closing in on him, the frogs and crickets chirping his name, the broken reeds moaning, cat-tails bouncing on a log in the wind, masquerading as an approaching horse. Tension and paranoia building and climbing, until at last the man snaps, begins to laugh it off– and is at once chased down by the old headless king of maniacal laughter. To the bridge! To the bridge! Almost, almost, but not quite…and so, for the first time in the history of children’s cinema as I know it, the main protagonist bites the big one in the final act, and the secondary villain marries the heiress. The end.

The "WTF" reaction that this generated in me as a child, I think, is what committed the tale so strongly to memory. That, of course, and the visuals, which are unusually creative, detailed, and brilliant. The story itself is also old. Very old. Although it was originally written in the late 1800s, it’s actually set in the late 1700s, making it the oldest celebrated american halloween story in existence. History is a vital part of any ghost story– as how can there be a ghost, if there was not a "long ago" from whence the ghost came? And the ghost of sleepy hollow, from a "long ago" in an already "long ago" has particular resonance. In the original story the ghost was said to be that of a german-british soldier, who had his head taken off in the revolutionary war by a stray cannon ball. Unlike renditions since, the original actually had no headless horseman in it. Ichabod simply set off for home, and never made it, and no one knew why. It’s alluded that the man with whom Ichabod was competing for the affections of a lady with; the one who marries her in the end; is, in fact, responsible for killing Ichabod on the trail and hiding his body, while blaming it on the ghost. This seems far more likely, practically speaking, and makes the story less about a ghost, and more about a rivalry with a dash of mystery, only loosely connected to a ghost, in that it’s used as a scapegoat.

But the legend, rather than the story, is much more palatable and enduring. It is about primal fear– fear of the darkness, and the unknown– and worse still, the fear that our fear of the unknown is, in fact, a valid one. That not only could there be something terrible and ghastly and menacing out there in the dark, but that there actually is something terrible and ghastly and menacing out there in the dark. If you’ve ever walked a trail through the woods at night; or down a long hallway, with the faintest light on the horizon with which to cling to, while all around you fingers of uncertainty and shade grope at you, you know the feeling very well. This, like all brilliant things that strike with cleavers of simplicity, is what makes the story so memorable.