Culture Overwrite & 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow'

Losing our heads...

Something spooky is afoot. Our collective memory has slipped on a banana-peel of Hollywood spinoffs and sequels, and nowhere are the consequences more clear than in the case of America’s most dearly beloved Halloween folktale! Read on to see how memories are made, remade, and rebooted.

Enjoy!

***Improvidence, an archaeofuturist fall folktale of horror, is FREE on Amazon until midnight this Halloween! One time offer!***

Culture Overwrite & The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

In 2022 I had the unnerving of experience of reading The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, a quintessential autumnal American folktale (like the much acclaimed Improvidence) that has spawned a fleet of cartoons, movies, television shows, and untold mountains of plastic Halloween toys.

What disturbed me about the experience was not the story's contents however. For those unfamiliar, Washington Irving spins the tale as one that his narrator heard second hand, concerning an Anglo schoolteacher interloping in a rural Dutch community. A great deal of ink is spilled contrasting our protagonist, Ichabod Crane's, caricaturized English materialism with the 'ethnic' Dutch villagers he is among. Crane is a stand-in for broader American society in a way, with both his modern views of education and aspirations towards property. In contrast the locals are settled, contented, and live in their oral traditions.

The very structure of the novella is a celebration of the fireside folktale, complimented by resplendent descriptions of the post-harvest food and drinks. And most notably, a headless horseman is absent from the tale.

Of course that’s not to say there’s never a mention of a folktale about a headless hessian ghost in the story, just that it’s clearly framed as a tale exchanged in the wee hours of the night amongst the villagers. The only appearance of the dreaded horseman is at the very end, after several clear hints that it is in fact Ichabod's rival in love, Brom Bones, scaring the ridiculous outsider out of town. I cannot imagine any adult actually reading the tale and coming to the conclusion the ghost was real.

But I remembered there being one! I’d read the book in the 5th grade and distinctly remembered being scared stiff by a description of the ghost being seen wandering holding a big nosed head after Ichabod disappeared.

This bothered me immensely, until I realized I had merely read a children’s “version" of the book. I suspect many people would feel similarly if they read the original story, because The Legend of Sleepy Hollow has been completely overwritten by its adaptations.

So if the original story of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is humorous social commentary and a celebration of folktale, where does it's reputation as a horror story come from? As far as I can tell, John Quidor’s 1858 painting seems to be the earliest literal interpretation of the story as a literal ghost story for dramatic effect. Following this, a short hand for the story was established: Sleepy Hollow was "the headless horseman story".

Halloween creates a demand for horror stories, which the many adaptations of Sleepy Hollow have contorted themselves to meet while still riding off the uncopyrighted recognizability of Irving’s work.

And now here we are about two centuries out from it’s initial publication, with a over five movies, seven television series, comics, and songs all directly interpreting its events, and every single one I have seen treating the ghost as an actual threat. Each redevelopment layers on visual media standards, a three act structure, and ‘holiday special’ marketing that motivates the creators to steer the plot away from the original meaning until its intent is completely obscured.

The great irony of all this is that the story was Washington Irving's appeal to reject "English" commercial sensibilities in favor of peasant folk tradition. And yet his story has become defanged into a "tradition" of seasonally marketed jump scares.

It seems the fate of any story that reaches mass popularity to have its meaning compressed into the simplest form possible — Star Wars is a lightsaber, western as a genre is a silhouette of a cowboy on horseback, and Sleepy Hollow is a headless horseman with pumpkin head in hand. I do not resent the loss of meaning in something that becomes oft referenced, however I do hate that such a special story has lost its meaning in our culture to the point that many people, like myself, believed they had experienced it when they actually hadn’t.

And so, this fall, I encourage you to read or listen to the original in all of its glory as an artifact of early American culture, celebrating its even older cultural roots.

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We’ve also released a novella ‘Improvidence’, a Lewis & Clark style adventure across the post-collapse ruins of America. Available FREE until Halloween 2024: https://a.co/d/3AGjHU2