November 19, 1999| According to the credits, Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow is based on the classic story by Washington Irving. But that seems a mere formality. Burton, the gleefully Goth visionary who previously gave us Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands and the first two Batman epics, clearly intends his latest effort as a loving homage, not a literary adaptation. Borrowing only a handful of elements from Irving’s tale of a headless horseman in the Hudson Valley, Burton has fashioned a fiendishly clever tribute to those sumptuously lurid horror films – The Gorgon, Frankenstein Created Woman, Horror of Dracula and many, many more -- produced by Britain’s Hammer Studios in the 1950s and ’60s.

To be sure, the period production design of Burton’s opus is far more lavish than anything ever offered in the stylish but inexpensive Hammer melodramas. But the overall visual scheme is strikingly similar, and even the casting enhances the wink-wink in-jokiness. Look closely at the supporting players and you’ll see Michael Gough, a charter member of the Hammer repertory company long before Burton hired him to play Batman’s loyal butler. Look even closer, and you’ll spot Christopher Lee, the grandly glowering star of Hammer’s long-running Dracula franchise.

Lee makes only a fleeting appearance in Sleepy Hollow, as a stern judge in 1799 New York City, but he’s around just long enough to set the plot into motion. Ichabod Crane, played by frequent Burton collaborator Johnny Depp, is no longer the skittish schoolteacher originally imagined by Irving. In Burton’s version – written by Andrew Kevin Walker (Seven) with, reportedly, uncredited help from Tom Stoppard – Crane has become an earnest constable who advocates scientific methods for crime-solving while his peers prefer to simply torture suspects into confessing. Lee’s judge has little patience for Crane’s more fastidious approach. So he sends the young constable off to an upstate hamlet to investigate reports of multiple murders.

Once in Sleepy Hollow, a gloomy Dutch community in grave need of enlightenment, Crane finds the fearful locals assume the recent killings are the grisly handiwork of a vengeful ghost. Twenty years earlier, during the Revolutionary War, a monstrous Hessian soldier (played in flashback by an aptly demonic Christopher Walken) cut a bloody swath through the community before being caught and decapitated. Now, unfortunately, it appears the Headless Horseman has returned to terrorize Sleepy Hollow.

Crane dismisses all talk of supernatural culprits, and begins a “scientific” investigation. The locals, led by the well-to-do Balthus Van Tassel (Michael Gambon), are profoundly unsettled by Crane’s analytical techniques – and not just because, after exhuming one of the bodies, he finds the victim was pregnant at the time of her death. (All the victims, it should be noted, were decapitated; their heads were never found.) But Crane himself is much more upset when he has his own close encounter with the sword-wielding wraith.

Depp gracefully treads a fine line between stylization and silliness as Ichabod Crane, perhaps the most tremulous hero to ever match wits with a bloodthirsty bogeyman since Abbott and Costello met Frankenstein. During moments of extreme stress, Crane is likely to faint, or dash behind the billowing skirts of the lovely Katrina Van Tassel (a radiantly pale Christina Ricci), the town father’s plucky daughter. Ultimately, however, the man of reason is able to maintain his composure long enough to deduce that the Headless Horseman isn’t on a random killing spree – that, in fact, the phantasm has been summoned by an all-too-human villain. Among the likely suspects: the entire Van Tassel family – including Lady Van Tassel (Miranda Richardson), Katrina’s beautiful stepmother – and the strident Reverend Steenwyck (Jeffrey Jones). Hardenbrook (Michael Gough), the local notary, and Brom (Casper Van Dien), Katrina’s prideful fiancé, also are under suspicion.

Handsomely photographed by Emmanuel Lubezki (Like Water for Chocolate), Sleepy Hollow is equal parts murder mystery, action-adventure and macabre horror show – the graphic decapitations often are genuinely shocking – filtered through the eccentric sensibility of filmdom’s clown prince of rococo flamboyance. It is, in short, a wall-to-wall hoot. And even if you have never seen the same movies that Tim Burton has, chances are good that you’ll want to see this one.