

Christina Ricci. I was maybe 5 or 6 the first time I saw the Addams Family movies, I was already extremely into everything scary and/or Halloween adjacent, and she was only a few years older than I was, and she was both pretty and scary, and the boy she gets paired with in Values reminded me of me. The overall effect of this was to fill me with a deep-seated lifelong fondness for spooky women in general and her in particular. A few years after that I saw Casper, which only reinforced the effect, and Sleepy Hollow showed up just in time for me to hit puberty.
They don’t need an excuse, they’ll make up whatever bullshit they need to justify whatever they were going to do anyway