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.

Decades apart big rig horror movies

1971 - Duel
An obvious choice. Stephen Spielberg's first film. And the one that most likely inspired the others on this list. It basically made a subgenre of killer big rigs all its own. It's creepy because you never understand the motivation behind the antagonist.

1981 - Road Games
We switch gears now and have the protagonist be the truck driver. A great Australian thriller, with a creepy murderer while being charmingly funny. Great script and acting. It's basically Duel meets Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window. It also co-stars a young Jamie Lee Curtis at the height of her Scream Queen status.

1991 - Terminator 2: Judgement Day
When the T1000 isn't killing people with giant knife arms, he's plowing into them with a big rig. This movie has some of the most epic sequences involving vehicles in any movie as only director James Cameron can. Obvious inspiration taken from Duel.

2001 - Roadkill/Joyride (US title)
What happens when Duel meets the comedy/thrillers of the 90s ala Scream? This movie. A young Paul Walker stars in this basically modern day Duel only this time the motivation of the antagonist is clear. And boy what an antagonist!  Voiced by the incomparable Ted "Buffalo Bill" Levine. "A prank gone wrong" is basically a horror movie subgenre of its own (Urban Legend, Cry Wolf). Co written and Produced by J.J. Abrams! It's a fun ride. They actually re-did the entire last 30 minutes of the film because originally it turned dark and lost the humour of the first hour completely. The redone ending is darker, snappier, funnier, and more personal.

2011 - Road Train/Kill
Another Australian killer big rig movie that i have yet to see. It looks like if Christine was a big rig. 

There are other great horror/thrillers involving vehicles. Breakdown (1997), Rubber, Maximum Overdrive, Christine, Deathproof, Wrecker, Deathrace (1, 2, Inferno, and 2000),
and of course the Mad Max franchise. But this list was all...
1) involving big rigs and
2) were exactly10 years apart (was an experiment to see if i could find ones that were).

Do you have a favourite? If i haven't listed it please comment below. Doesn't matter the year of the movie or the make of the vehicle.

UPDATE! 2021 - not much LOL I guess theres a scene in the Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City with a big rig