Caroline Preece has more than 15 years of experience writing entertainment content. Her work for outlets including Den of Geek, Backstage, Tom’s Guide, CultBox, and Starburst prioritizes sharp analysis and reader-first reporting with a particular interest in the ways storytelling, audience behavior, and digital culture drive modern entertainment trends.

Sydney Sweeney has spent the past year proving she can open a film on her name alone, and her next move trades the present day for one of America's oldest ghost stories. The twist is whose eyes it's told through: not the schoolteacher who has anchored every version for two centuries, but the woman who, until now, was only ever the prize he was chasing.

For Sweeney, adding her name to what will surely be a major horror reboot couldn't be better timed. She arrives off The Housemaid, the modestly budgeted erotic thriller that climbed past $400 million worldwide on a reported $35 million spend — her highest-grossing film as a lead, and comfortably ahead of Anyone But You. Not every recent bet paid off, mind you; the neo-western Americana barely registered in theaters before heading to streaming. With period drama The Custom of the Country on its way, and Euphoria having now closed out its divisive final season, producing her own studio features is the natural next step.

Sydney Sweeney will take the lead in Hollow, a contemporary reimagining of Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," the 1820 short story that introduced the Headless Horseman of American folklore. According to Deadline, Lindsey Anderson Beer sold Hollow as her debut novel to Putnam, an imprint of Penguin Random House, in a preemptive deal that pulled it off the table before it could reach auction. She will write and direct the feature adaptation herself, with Sweeney attached to star as Katrina Van Tassel and produce. The project is expected to hit the market as early as this week and should spark a healthy bidding war.

The framing of Hollow as a supernatural mystery with seductive love-triangle elements keeps her in familiar territory, which has served her well since her breakout turn in The White Lotus. Beer, meanwhile, is no stranger to reworking familiar horror. She made her feature directorial debut on Paramount's Pet Sematary: Bloodlines in 2023, the prequel to Stephen King's classic, and her writing credits stretch back to the teen comedy Sierra Burgess Is a Loser.

The Headless Horseman approaches the Tree of the Dead in Sleepy Hollow (1999)Paramount Pictures

By her own account, Beer avoids rewatching earlier screen versions — Tim Burton's 1999 film among them — and digs instead into Irving's text and Hudson Valley ghost lore. Beer has circled this material before: she's been attached to a Sleepy Hollow retelling at Paramount since 2022, but Hollow is the first project of hers that’s pulled entirely from her own fiction, page to screen.

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Hollow is also the first feature from Honey Trap, the banner Sweeney launched only days earlier under a first-look deal with Sony, run alongside longtime collaborator Kaylee McGregor. LuckyChap, the company behind Barbie, is producing too, with Beer's Lab Brew. The novel lands in fall 2027, timed to keep pace with a film that, for now, still needs a studio willing to call it home.

Release Date November 19, 1999

Runtime 106 Minutes

Director Tim Burton

Writers Andrew Kevin Walker, Kevin Yagher