The Headless Horseman

The Headless Horseman (1922)

The village of Sleepy Hollow is getting ready to greet the new schoolteacher, Ichabod Crane, who is coming from New York. Crane has already heard of the village's legendary ghost, a headless horseman who is said to be searching for the head that he lost in battle. The schoolteacher has barely arrived when he begins to pursue the beautiful young heiress Katrina Van Tassel, angering Abraham Van Brunt, who is courting her. Crane's harsh, small-minded approach to teaching also turns some of the villagers against him. Soon there many who would like to see him leave the village altogether.

Date of release
1922-11-05
TMDB
5.3 / 10 (10)
Runtime
1h 16m
Genres
Horror, Adventure
Director
Edward D. Venturini

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Based on: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

The Headless Horseman is a 1922 American silent film adaptation of Washington Irving's 1820 short story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" directed by Edward D. Venturini. It stars Will Rogers, Lois Meredith and Ben Hendricks Jr. It was the first panchromatic black-and-white feature film.

Production

The stern schoolmaster Ichabod Crane, who at one point beats a student, was played by Rogers, a popular actor playing against his typical roles for which he received $19,583.20. For authenticity, filming took place in the Hudson River Valley around Tarrytown, New York, the setting of Washington Irving's story, with its Dutch farm houses and covered bridges.

The Headless Horseman was the first black-and-white feature film photographed entirely on panchromatic stock, which, while two to three times more expensive, did not have the tendency to turn blue eyes and skies white and lipstick as black like the commonly used orthochromatic film did. One effective special effect was the use of a double exposure to give the headless horseman a phantom-like appearance.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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