There’s not a hint of religion in the Disney version, beyond a fleeting glimpse of Katrina Van Tassel’s wedding. Toad follows both Irving and the Venturini adaptation.

The 1949 Disney package-film The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Everyone, however, falls asleep during the sermon and the religious aspect is funny rather than frightening. Since the Psalms were the songbook of the era, The Headless Horseman has Crane leading church choir. Crane has the role, also in the Irving story, of teaching singing. One of the added scenes involved a church service–and it was played strictly for laughs. The Headless Horseman from 1922, starring Will Rogers, follows Irving fairly closely, but the short story required some padding to make a feature-length film. How had religion come into the story? It weaves in and out with the long history of films based on this singular tale. Not only was the phantom horseman likely a prank of Brom Bones, but there’s no mention of religion beyond Crane teaching his students to sing Psalms, which was authentic to the period. Combining Irving’s tale “Rip van Winkle” with that of “Sleepy Hollow,” the premise was that Ichabod Crane has just awakened after two-hundred years “dead.” In modern Sleepy Hollow he learns that the headless horseman is still after him and the key to stopping him is George Washington’s Bible. The sleeper hit of the fall lineup was Fox’s Sleepy Hollow. You can watch 1922’s The Headless Horseman on YouTube:įast forward to 2013. Two other silent films addressed the topic as well, but they don’t survive in film. While horror films have a longer pedigree than is generally acknowledged, this was clearly an early attempt to translate a ghost story to cellulite. Published two centuries ago in 1820, Irving’s story was the basis for one of the early ghost films of the cinematographic era- The Headless Horseman (1922), directed by Edward D. It also may have contributed to the series’ demise. This addition fueled two seasons of Fox’s sleeper hit of 2013, Sleepy Hollow.

This secular ghost story became a big screen hit with the addition of a religious element to the script. Katrina’s beau, Brom Bones, frightens the credulous schoolmaster out of town by masquerading as the headless horseman of local lore. Among the most enduring of stories for fall frights is the short story by Washington Irving, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” The story is simple: an outsider schoolmaster, Ichabod Crane, comes to Sleepy Hollow and is smitten by Katrina Van Tassel. When autumn rolls around horror movies awake.

Sleepy hollow movie cast