Is Sleepy Hollow Scary? The Verdict and the Whole Plot

A constable who does not believe in headless ghosts

In the fall of 1799, the New York City constable Ichabod Crane is sent to Sleepy Hollow to look into several beheadings. The victims include the landowner Peter Van Garrett, his son Dirk, and a widow named Emily Winship. The town elders, who include the wealthy farmer Baltus Van Tassel, tell Ichabod the killer is the ghost of a headless Hessian soldier hunting for his missing head. Ichabod does not buy it. He moves into the Van Tassel house, starts falling for Baltus's daughter Katrina, and takes on a teenager, Young Masbath, as his assistant after the boy's father becomes the next victim. They dig up the earlier victims and learn that the widow was pregnant when she died. Then Ichabod sees the Hessian kill with his own eyes.

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A grave with nobody's head in it

Ichabod, Masbath and Katrina go into the Western Woods, where a crone tells them where the Hessian is buried, at the tree of the dead. Ichabod digs up the grave and finds a skeleton with no skull, so he concludes someone else has the skull and is using it to control the Hessian. That night the Horseman kills the midwife Beth Killian and her family, and Katrina's suitor Brom Van Brunt, who tries to stop him. Ichabod then works out a motive from the notary Hardenbrook, who lets slip that Van Garrett had secretly married the widow and signed everything over to her and the baby she was carrying. Everyone killed so far either inherited from that will or witnessed it. Ichabod decides the Horseman's master is Baltus, who would have inherited if the will did not exist, and finds a chalked pentagram under his bed.

The church was supposed to be safe

Katrina finds out what Ichabod suspects and wrecks his evidence so her father stays out of it. Hardenbrook kills himself, and Reverend Steenwyck calls a meeting at the church to discredit Ichabod. In the middle of it, Baltus bursts in and announces that the Horseman has killed his wife, Mary Van Tassel. The elders turn on each other, and Steenwyck and Lancaster are killed in the chaos. The Horseman cannot enter the church, so he throws a harpoon through a window, hooks Baltus, drags him out, and takes his head. This is the scene to brace for, and it comes in the middle of the movie. You will see a man dragged through a window and his head taken. Afterward Katrina draws a pentagram that matches the one under Ichabod's bed, and he decides she must be the Horseman's master.

The stepmother has been busy

Ichabod checks Katrina's book of charms and learns her pentagram was a protective one. He also examines the body he thought was Mary and finds the injury happened after death, which means it belongs to the Van Tassels' servant Sarah. Mary is alive. She takes Katrina to a windmill and explains that her family was poor and was evicted by Van Garrett to make room for the Van Tassels. As a child she watched the Hessian die, and she later pledged herself to Satan to bring him back. She married into the Van Tassel family by killing Katrina's mother and taking her place. She then pulled the other elders into the plot through blackmail and lust. She has been working through the heirs and witnesses one at a time.