Sleepy Hollow 1999 is a good but not true adaptation

Wow, this movie is 17 years old! Available on Netflix, weirdly not for sale at JB HIFI. I remember how crazy thrilling this movie was, seeing decapitations without the film cutting away. The sense of mystery, set up, pay off, mix of comedy and horror, and an amazing cast.

I actually remember reading the Washington Irving original short story before seeing the film, and it's a good adaptation... not a true adaptation. A closer adaptation is ironically the Disney animated short. The original story makes a great campfire tale as it ends rather ambiguously, but it neeeded the additions the movie provides to flesh it out as an adaptation. That said it does change the protagonist emensely. Icabod Crane was a rather opportunistic unlikeable creature in the original story, which allowed you to be ok with his "end". With the addition of the murder mystery plot to flesh out the tale, and with making it about the dawn of a new millennium (a common theme with movies released in 1999) the theme of science vs mysticism, the movie changed Crane into a young awkward scientific detective. This works for 2 main reasons. 1 Crane is now a sympathetic protagonist we would be willing to spend 90 minutes with. And 2 it allows the opportunistic inheritance grubbing subplot (Crane originally was chiefly motivated by greed and wooed what would become his love interest in the movie just to marry in to the money and land that she would inherent) to be placed elsewhere and support the main mystery plot.

In so far that nothing is truly lost in translation, just repurposed and shifted around to serve the structure of the film. Hense i find it to be a good adaptation. As good as the original short story is it wouldn't work as a 1 to 1 translation to film, unless it was an episode of something like Tales From The Crypt.