The Terminator franchise has had many ups and downs, but bizarrely, one of the best Terminator movies ever made – in spirit – is Tim Burton’s 1999 horror movie Sleepy Hollow. While The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day remain towering classics of action and sci-fi, no subsequent Terminator movie has equaled them in popularity. While that has led to James Cameron himself penning a Terminator reboot, Sleepy Hollow follows the Terminator template to a shockingly apt degree.
Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow is a very loose adaptation of the Washington Irving short story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, with the movie following Ichabod Crane (played by Tim Burton movie regular Johnny Depp) as he ventures to Sleepy Hollow to put a stop the Headless Horseman’s rampage of decapitations. Despite taking place in the year 1799 and featuring no killer cyborgs or time travel, Burton’s Sleepy Hollow gives a surprising and very effective makeover for the Headless Horseman. In short, Burton’s version of Sleepy Hollow transforms the Headless Horseman into a sword-wielding, otherworldly Terminator.
Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow Is A Gothic Version Of The Terminator
In James Cameron’s The Terminator, Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) finds herself targeted by a Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger), with Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) arriving to protect her. Reese reveals that he and the Terminator are from the future in which mankind is at war with a sentient A.I. known as Skynet and its machine army. The Terminator has been sent back to the year 1984 to kill Sarah before she can give birth to John Connor, who grows up to lead humanity to defeat Skynet. Obviously, this doesn’t sound anything like Sleepy Hollow, but there is more at work in Burton’s film than meets the eye.
Like the Terminator, the Headless Horseman (played by Ray Park without a head and Christopher Walken with one) arrives to take his victims in Sleepy Hollow from another world of sorts, with the Horseman returning from Hell rather than time-traveling into the past. Additionally, far from being a mythical killer as he is in Irving’s story, Burton’s Headless Horseman is on a clearly defined mission of assassination. With Burton swapping the techno-horror vibes of the Terminator for his famed dark and gloomy gothic visual style, he gives a significant visual makeover to the basic Terminator premise, but that’s hardly the only change he makes in Sleepy Hollow.
Burton’s Sleepy Hollow Has Nothing To Do With Its Source Material
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While Tim Burton is no stranger to adaptations like his Batman films, 2001’s Planet of the Apes, and Alice in Wonderland, Sleepy Hollow is more of a completely Burton-ized take on the Washington Irving short story. Irving’s Sleepy Hollow introduces Ichabod Crane as a schoolteacher hoping to marry Katrina Van Tassel in order to become an heir to the Van Tassel estate. In doing so, Ichabod forms a rivalry with her suitor Brom. The legend of the Headless Horseman is also presented ambiguously, with Ichabod fleeing Sleepy Hollow after an apparent attack by the Horseman, and the story implying it was actually a disguised Brom.
Aside from the title, setting, and characters, Burton’s Sleepy Hollow all but completely tosses out everything in Irving’s story. Ichabod Crane is re-imagined as a New York City constable investigating the beheadings in Sleepy Hollow and developing a much less tumultuous romance with Katrina Van Tassel (Christina Ricci) while the Headless Horseman himself is confirmed to be real despite Ichabod’s initial skepticism. The changes to the Headless Horseman’s history and motivations are some of the most significant in Burton’s Sleepy Hollow, and these changes bring into focus Burton’s Terminator influences on the story.
Burton’s Headless Horseman Is A Supernatural Terminator
Over the course of his investigation, Ichabod Crane discovers that the Horseman’s head has been removed from his grave. While this leads Ichabod to surmise that the former Hessian mercenary has risen from the grave “to take heads till his own is restored to him“, he also comes to discover that the Horseman is targeting specific residents of Sleepy Hollow. Eventually, it is revealed that Katrina’s stepmother Mary (Miranda Richardson) dug up the Horseman’s skull in order to control him and kill her way into inheriting the fortune of Baltus Van Tassel (Michael Gambon). In order words, the Headless Horseman becomes a “programmed” assassin, and, in effect, a supernatural Terminator.
The Headless Horseman’s similarities with Terminators don’t stop there either; the Horseman is essentially unstoppable since he is already dead, which perhaps makes him even more invincible than a standard Terminator. Moreover, like Kyle Reese’s warning that a Terminator “can’t be bargained with, it can’t be reasoned with,” Burton’s Horseman is similarly dead-set on completing every assassination mission Mary gives him. This is particularly evident in the scene where he stops to kill the child of Sleepy Hollow’s midwife, and when he spares Baltus in the town church, due to the Horseman not being able to enter holy ground.
Additionally, like a Terminator, the Horseman also will not bother with killing anyone he has not been tasked with eliminating unless they make it necessary. Sleepy Burton emphasizes this point in graphic detail when Brom (Casper Van Dien) repeatedly attacks the Headless Horseman as he tries to depart, eventually goading the Horseman into chopping him in two. While this is a major departure from Brom remaining alive and well in Washington Irving’s short story, it also highlights the kind of movie Burton has re-imagined Sleepy Hollow into and the Terminator DNA it carries.
The Terminator Similarities Make Sleepy Hollow A Better Halloween Movie
In many ways, Sleepy Hollow is arguably Tim Burton’s best film, with the movie showing Burton at his most clearly unrestrained. While his changes to Sleepy Hollow‘s story and characters are indeed drastic, Burton also relishes in what is effectively his first slasher movie (and one of only two in his filmography next to 2007’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.) The idea of a Tim Burton slasher movie certainly makes for a splendid Halloween season movie night, but Burton’s re-invention of the Headless Horseman into a Terminator from beyond the grave takes that further by giving Sleepy Hollow a Michael Myers-level villain whose supernatural abilities are overt rather than implied.
Combined with Burton’s gothic sensibilities, Sleepy Hollow is a genuinely scary movie in which the dread of the Horseman’s next beheading is palpable throughout the film’s runtime, just like the fearsome, nigh-unstoppable horror movie villain Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 embodies in The Terminator. In the end, Burton’s understanding of how effective and scary a Terminator on an assassination mission really is the most unexpected legacy of Sleepy Hollow. As the Terminator franchise has struggled so much after Terminator 2, Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow nails everything about James Cameron’s cybernetic killer from the future while masking it under a supernatural gothic horror movie tale.
