Revealing mistake: When Brom (disguised as the horseman) throws the jack-o-lantern at Ichabod, there is a shot from Ichabod's perspective showing the jack-o-lantern flying toward him. It jiggles from side to side, revealing it was travelling on a wire.
Revealing mistake: When the headless horseman's head is being dropped into his grave it bounces on the dirt like rubber.
Continuity mistake: 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. (00:16:45)
Continuity mistake: 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. (00:03:40)
Revealing mistake: 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. (01:37:20)
Continuity mistake: 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. (01:05:25)
Revealing mistake: When the whole town's in the church and Katrina'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. (01:18:10)
Continuity mistake: 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. (00:53:00)
Continuity mistake: 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. (00:53:00)
Continuity mistake: 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. (01:04:30)
Continuity mistake: 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. (01:28:55)
Continuity mistake: 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. (01:18:10)
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 mistake: 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. (01:18:00)
Other mistake: 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. (01:30:25)
Continuity mistake: 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 mistake: 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.
Continuity mistake: 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 mistake: 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. (01:00:20)
Continuity mistake: 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. (00:27:55)
Suggested correction: It doesn't bounce off the dirt, it slightly bounces off his chest plate, as physics would dictate.
Phaneron ★