'Sleepy Hollow' Is a Tale of the Founding

Halloween has somehow become a celebration of America becoming American, a New World unlike the Old World, a place where horror is a literary or cinematic genre rather than a memory—the dimly recollected past stretching back millennia through seemingly endless suffering, man’s inhumanity to man, older than civilization. Yet Halloween also reminds us that we are not so far advanced in our peaceful prosperity that we have overcome the suffering that flesh is heir to. It’s the celebration when those dark possibilities return, and are strangely attractive, suggesting we have somehow lost something for all our gains.