Sleepy Hollow (1999) - 36 mistakes

Continuity: When Johnny Depp is axing the Headless Horseman's tree, he is covered in blood. The camera pans to the boy and Christina Ricci, and then back to Johnny Depp, and he is magically clean again.

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: 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.

Revealing: When the Headless Horseman is about to kiss Catrina's stepmother, you can see his actual teeth behind the filed ones. Christopher Walken's teeth are blacked out and their outline is visible against his tongue during the closeup of his face.

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: 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: 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: 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: Crane sprinkles a powder on the ground under the severed neck of Masbeth. Smoke comes up and he says something about a chemical reaction. Masbeth was running at full speed when killed, his body must have traveled at least his body length forward and maybe a few feet more, so there would be no blood under his neck as the Horseman decapitated him while he was standing and his blade cauterized all the neck tissue, veins and arteries.

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 Ichabod Crane and young Masbath are riding to the Tree of the Dead for the first time, watch the boy's horse carefully. The camera pans behind a tree and when it comes out from behind it, for a second you can only see Gunpowder's haunches (Gunpowder being the grey that Ichabod rides) and not the chesnut's. Very hard to spot if you are not watching carefully.

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: When Ichabod joins the men in Van Tassel's study, he closes the book and places it under his arm with the spine facing the floor, but next shot from behind the spine faces up.

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

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: 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.

Continuity: During the sequence where the Ichabod and The Horseman are fighting on top of the carriage, it's quite obvious that the two horses Masbeth and Katrina are riding keep changing colour. Sometimes they are both dark brown but sometimes Katrina's is dark brown and Masbeth's is white.

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: 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: When Ichabod arrives at Jonathan Masbath's murder scene, he selects a small bottle full of green powder to begin his investigation. The amount in the bottle changes from half-full to full in between shots.

Continuity: At the funeral of Jonathan Masbath, there are many shots between Ichabod, Brom and Katrina. There are a few people between Ichabod, Katrina, and Brom. When Ichabod looks over at the other two, the people are gone. Then when they show another overall view, the people are back.

Continuity: In the scene where Crane and the Headless Horseman are fighting atop the moving carriage, Crane shoots at the horseman, leaving a mark on the roof of the carriage. In the next shots, the mark is gone.

Revealing: If you look carefully, just before Catrina's father is being pulled away by the Horseman, just before he goes through the window, it's obvious that he's a dummy.

Audio problem: Near the end of the movie, when Ichabod gives the horseman his head back, in one shot, the horseman has his sword in one hand, and in the next shot he puts his head on with both hands; yet we do not hear any sound of him either dropping his sword or re-sheathing it.

Continuity: At the end of the movie, after Ichabod gives the Horseman back his head, he and Katrina are shown standing next to each other, and her hair is completely down around her face. It then goes to a shot of them from behind, watching the Horseman, and her hair is pulled back. Next shot of them from the front, it's all down again.

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: When Peter Van Garret's son gets his head chopped off Peter Van Garret looks out of the window. In the close-up his mouth opens in a gasp. Then it goes to a long shot showing the son with no head and Peter Van Garret's mouth is suddenly closed and then he gasps again in the exact same way.

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 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 first sees the cut on the Widow Winship's stomach, it looks to be quite shallow, but when he is performing his autopsy, the cut is much deeper.

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.

Other: Near the end of the movie, Ichabod, Katrina and the young boy are in the old windmill when the horseman arrives. When the three good characters jump onto the moving sails Ichabod drops a lantern down to the floor setting the whole windmill on fire. He, the little boy and Katrina jump off the sail onto the ground and start running back to their carriage some yards away. A camera shot shows the top of the building explode and we see a very quick shot of the whole windmill exploding in flames, but Ichabod, Katrina and the little boy have disappeared. Two shots later they are still running to the carriage.

Other: Towards the end of the movie when Ichabod discovers that Peter van Garrett and widow Winship were secretly married, we see the marriage certificate. The bride is shown as Emily Winship (maiden). Surely she should have been described as a widow because a maiden was the term for a woman who had never been married.

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.

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.