Kicking off my Fall season this year, I decided to join some friends on a podcast to discuss ‘The Hollow’ a modern day sequel to the ‘Headless Horseman’ story thats really more like an extended high school melodrama than a horror film honestly.
The plot is set in the modern day of 2004, and a young high school student looking to branch into local history has taken a job talking about the tale of the headless hoseman in sleepy hollow. Its initially played as just that, a fictional tale, but after a chance encounter with a gravekeeper, its revealed that theres more to the myth than first meets the eye and that our hapless local historian may in fact be a long lost descendant of Ichabod Crane.
With a growing love triangle emerging out of left field between a Jock, our hero and the head of the cheerleading team COMBINED with a subplot about our lead and his dad not having the best relationship in the world…The annual Halloween Hayride may be thrown into chaos when the headless horseman seemingly returns from the grave.
This one? was dull. painfully dull. A good friend of mine put it best ‘There are ‘Horror’ movies, and ‘Halloween’ movies…This is a Halloween movie’ and its true. The horseman himself appears for around 30 seconds in the first 12 minutes of the movie and then isnt seen again until the 50 minute mark of the film, The movie itself has 5 minutes of end credits and 3 minutes of opening titles making the just over an hour and 22 minutes ACTUALLY an hour and 17, and basically the entire movie struggles to deliver on the premise almost immediately.
The opening act is split down the middle, with the first half of act 1 more than meeting the brief in setting up a ‘modern’ sleepy hollow sequel. But the second half of the first HEAVILY deviates into what is essentially a ‘Dawsons creek’ style high school drama…the grave keepers appearence is welcome, but he’s basically just doing a dollar store ‘Crazy Ralph’ impression that doesnt grow much beyond that. Amazingly, he’s probably the best thing in this film and he seems to largely understand that this film ISNT going to be the next great work, and so he kind of leans into a not *too* serious quasi comedy portrayal for the character. Which was very endearing.
The 2nd act is a flabby stodge of high school drama and the gravekeeper trying to convince our lead that nefarious happenings are occuring…which leads us to a 3rd act finale thats *fine*, but left quite a bit to be desired and ended VERY abruptly and without logical reason.
The tone of this things all over the place, I dont think they knew for sure whether they wanted to be VERY serious or a little tongue in cheek, so they try both and it ends up not quite achieving either. the pacing is criminally slow for most of the runtime as the film DESPERATELY tries to hit TV movie feature runtime…
It seems to REALLY want to do gore and proper horror, but because this film was seemingly produced for the ABC Family channel, it means all but one of the kills happens off screen, and the ONE sex scene in the film contains no nudity, no visual sex and ends with one of the worst decapitation scenes i’ve seen in a good while.
Non of the characters have any sense of depth or detail. What you see is what you get, they’re all one note, stereotypes of the type of character they’re supposed to be, so the Jock is THE jockiest jock, the football dad is THE most negative toxic one note football dad you’ve seen.
Because theres no depth, once you get who these characters are, it quickly dries the whole film out, as you realise, these characters arnt going to grow and develop across the runtime. This is all theres going to be for the 83 minutes (+commercials)
Put it this way, if I was checking this out, looking to scratch a horror itch. I’d have been VERY dissapointed. this is a film that trades more on vibes than anything else, and even than…its not particularly great at that.
The direction and cine are ‘fine’ all things considered. I didnt love it, the creative decision to add a little camera sway to most of the shots, I believe was intended to give a sense of unease…but ultimately, it felt forced and didnt suit the scenarios at hand. the colour grade choices were overly basic and kind of poor…its basically desaturated and tinted orange…the fact they’ve black crushed all the night footage too makes a lot of the 3rd act pretty painful to sit through, because you stuggle to see whats actually going on, and what you can see is edited so feverishly it makes it hard to absorb.
Compositions overly basic and a little dry, its a step up from the SOV circuit at the time…but not by much, and the edit is breakneck and frankly unpleasent in places.
The performances are all equally one note, and quite dry. With only Stacy Keach as the gravekeeper really having ANY kind of memorable/notable character within the piece…Everyone else (including star to be Kaley Cuoco) were just utterly forgettable and lacked any real kind of on screen presence.
And the soundtrack is THE most generic early 2000’s grunge score you’ve ever heard in your life.
Oh…and as an aside (because the world NEEDS TO KNOW!) there are several scenes where Ian (our main character) and his mum have heart to hearts…the way those scenes are shot though are VERY weirdly arranged and give the impression they’re romantically involved. In fact during the first altercation between them, I missed the fact she was Ians mum and thought they were dating…its SO weird…
The Hollow is about as generic as they come for low budget early 2000s horror/vibe movies. It lacks any kind of depth or ‘bite’ that would have really kept me watching, it feels rushed in some places, dragged out WAY past the reasonable limits in others and the near total lack of gore or on screen kills really hampers an already yawn worthy production. I wasnt a fan of this, I cant recommend it and im almost certain there are other better ‘sleep hollow’ adjacent productions out there…Dull.
TYTD Reviews 