Horror of Sleepy Hollow

I am feeble and sore broken: I have roared my reason by the disquietness of my heart.

For my loins are filled with a loathsome disease: and there is no soundness in my flesh.

Lord, all my desire is before thee: and my groaning is not hid from thee.

I awoke with a start this night hence from a dream I poorly remember and spoke these psalms I learned as a youngster in simpler and happier times of religious instruction.

Certainly the order of psalm 38 was broken - I called verse eight, then seven, then nine as I awoke, as if the order of the world itself was warped and wrong.

But we who face death so soon; who, by our advanced years, know the horror that awaits our earthly vessel - that of fire or cold earth - are prone to mathematical confusion, just as we are prone to ghastly fancy and phantasm come nightfall.

How very real it all becomes.

How very real.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow imagined by American author Washington Irving, and published in 1820, played with such fearful apparitions of the mind.

The story, of course, is set in 1790 in the secluded glen of Sleepy Hollow.

It relates the tale of Ichabod Crane, the superstitious schoolmaster from Connecticut, and his competition with Abraham ''Brom Bones'' Van Brunt, the town rowdy, for the hand of 18-year-old Katrina Van Tassel.

And who, in their younger years, did not fight for the love of a pretty girl (or full-lipped, lithe and muscular youth), with the town rowdy?

I know I did.

Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow also told the story of a headless horseman, said to be the ghost of a trooper whose head was parted from his frame by a cannonball during the American Revolutionary War, who rides forth to the scene of battle in nightly quest of his head.

Underneath its horror story trappings it told a more prosaic tale of the success of the town rowdy in scaring away his rival.

Sleepy Hollow, the 13-part drama coming next Tuesday to Prime, appears to dismiss all such trappings of reality.

Ichabod Crane is still there, as is the headless horseperson.

But both are transported into the future.

Mr Crane (Tom Mison) emerges from the grave to stumble, somewhat confused after 250 years, on to a modern road.

The local police are called to a misty farm where ''something is scaring the horses'', and one officer soon loses his head to the axe-wielding headless horseman.

Advertised as ''a modern twist'' on a classic, it takes things in an entirely new direction.

It sounds silly, but it's actually quite good.

- Charles Loughrey

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