Sleepy Hollow (1999) - 36 mistakes

Continuity: When the last will and testament is signed and then sealed at the start, the wax seal differs significantly in following shots.

Continuity: We are told that the horseman's sword cauterises the wounds it makes. Earlier on in the film, however, the cuts cause squirts of blood to fly into the air, such as when the scarecrow is sprayed with blood.

Continuity: In the flashback to the death of the headless horseman, when the horseman's steed gets shot and falls to the ground, the blood and the wound are on the right side of the horse...later in the scene when the horse is seen again, the wound is on the left side of the horse.

Continuity: When Ichabod Crane has arrived at Jonathan Masbath's murder scene, after he has retraced the horseman's steps, he goes to open his bag. Look carefully at his hands. When he goes to open the bag from a wide angle his right hand is on our side of the handle, but when the camera cuts to a close-up, it has instantly jumped to his side of the handle.

Continuity: When the widow's body is on the operating table, in the wideshot Ichabod removes the first medical instrument from his bag and is placing it on the table. In the next close-up, as he removes his hands from the instrument we see that it is actually the second instrument he has put down, with the first one right beside it.

Continuity: When Ichabod is visiting the witch for information on the Horseman, we see them sit at the table where the witch chains herself to the wall and demonstrates how much reach she has and that she can't touch him. When she transforms, she knocks over the table and tackles Ichabod to the floor. Even if she was starting to pull the chains out of the wall like in the film, that still wouldn't have given her the extra foot and a half needed to tackle Ichabod to the ground.

Continuity: When Ichabod is chopping the tree of the dead, you can see that a few of the blood spurts are coming from straight across and not from below, where he is chopping.

Continuity: When the little boy is playing with one those revolving lamps (that are supposed to cast shapes and such on the walls of a dark room), you can see that the light source for the lamp is a candle flame. Candles, as you know, aren't extremely bright, and they flicker. Yet, the images and shapes being cast on the wall behind the boy are extremely bright and never flicker once. They're also not much like the shapes cut in the lamp.

Continuity: When that boy lights the spinning lamp that casts shapes on everything, we can clearly see the shapes on the wall behind him, but they never shine on him or his mother.

Other: After the midwife's son lights the candles, watch closely, as the lamp revolves clockwise, you will see the cutout of the witch on the broom. It shows the witch facing to the right (counter-clockwise), which means that the projection would and should show the witch "flying" backwards.

Continuity: When young Ichabod jumps back from the sight of his mother in the iron maiden, he punctures his hands on a spiked chair. The hand area of the chair shows approximately six rows of four spikes and would be very hard for his small hand to have gotten more than seven or eight punctures at the most, rather than the twenty or so he sees on his hand after he wakes up.

Continuity: When Ichabod is with the young Masbath discussing conspiracy, he writes down key words such as 'conspiracy', 'the secret', '5 to 4' and 'points to'. The handwriting, its size, and position on the paper differ significantly in following shots.

Continuity: In about the middle of the film where Ichabod Crane is writing doing process of elimination. He writes "Baltus" in cursive. Watch the tail of the "s" on "Baltus." One or two shots after that the "s" on "Baltus" is clearly different than the one we watched him write. The "l" in Baltus changes too.

Continuity: When Ichabod and young Mazbeth are in the shop looking for information and they find the boy's father's will, Ichabod's hair changes from a neat bob to really messy and scruffy three or four times each time the shot moves away from him then back again.

Continuity: In the shot where Baltus Van Tassel is speared through with the fence post at the church, you hear a pane of glass in the window break but you never see the post actually go through the window nor do you see the rope that is tied to it at all in the shot. The post simply "appears" coming out of his chest.

Continuity: At the church scene, the Horseman hauls a piece of fence through the church window and through Christina Ricci's father. After much screaming and amazement, the old man is ripped back through the window. However when he is torn from the church back out the window, the window breaks before he hits it. And wouldn't some of the window have broken when the spear was thrown through in the first place? We don't hear breaking glass or see any broken window panes.

Revealing: When the whole town's in the church and Catrina's father gets the pole through his stomach, if you watch while he gets dragged through the graveyard, he hits a headstone and it moves back.

Continuity: When Catrina's father is being violently pulled out of the church window, the horseman drags him in to a fence where his head is stuck in the fence. If you look at the man whose head is caught at first, his head is not all the way sticking out of the fence. The next shot, it is.

Continuity: Johnny Depp's character repeatedly plays with a little red bird in a cage toy during the movie. Towards the end, he is riding in a carriage and playing with it. We see a shot from his eye view and the bird is upright, meaning if we were seeing it from the opposite side it would be upside down. But immediately after that, we see a shot facing Ichabod. The bird is upright, not like it should normally be. We then cut directly to another shot of Ichabod's view, the bird is upright yet again!

Continuity: Near the end of the movie, when Ichabod, Katrina and the young Masbath are in the windmill, they closed the door with flour bags. They put 4 in place, but in the shot later, there are only 3.