There’s a kernel of a good horror movie here.
A cornfield should be a place of abundance; of life and growth, and it’s by subverting that idea that Children of the Corn feeds its atmosphere of malice. Stalks tower like sentinels, rustling not with the breeze but with menace, and somewhere in the thickets lurks He Who Walks Behind the Rows, a name as unsettling as it is unexplained. It’s key to the film’s appeal, the vaguer its mythology – the denser the corn – the more gripping it becomes.
Stephen King’s 1977 short story was a lean parable about small-town religious mania, parents slaughtered by their own offspring, and a couple who stumble upon the ruins. King’s story is uncommonly economical for him and he sets up the corn-worshipping cult, their zealot leader Isaac and his enforcer Malachai, then leaves readers with the terrifying inference that this malignancy stretches further than those rural cornfields in a scant twenty-odd pages and extending it to a feature length needed the sowing of some additional seeds. Those seeds sprout into Sarah and Job, a pair of children who were spared by but never members of the cult. Job is our gateway into the world of Gatlin, Nebraska, narrating the opening of the movie which gives us the CliffsNotes version of the cult’s initial generational genocide – a mixture of poisoned coffee and blade-fuelled bloodletting – and tips us off to his sister Sarah’s prophetic drawings. For characters added after the fact, they both feel very King-esque in their creation and together with the stranded couple Burt (Peter Horton) and Vicky (Linda Hamilton), with whom we spend a bit more time, they form a quartet it’s easy to care about and cling to the faint hope they can survive what’s about to unfold.
It’s that last change that warps the material the most: the hope. King’s short story ends with the adults consumed, quite literally, by the corn’s sinister deity but director Fritz Kiersch’s film, by contrast, crafts a more conventional showdown where plucky survivors outwit their tweenage tormentors, moving the whole thing closer to Children of the Popcorn. The kids may be creepy and the adults under siege, but at no point does the movie fully commit to the dark, dark nihilism of King’s original vision.
Still, there’s no denying the power of John Franklin’s performance as Isaac. His strange, ageless face and fervid delivery give the film a real spark of the uncanny and foreshadows the same unnervingly repellent energy that Jack Gleeson would bring to Game Of Thrones‘ King Joffrey, with Courtney Gains’ Malachai providing intimidating muscle and a point of division amongst the faithful. The rest of the kindergration are somewhat generic, there to participate in a few bloody set-pieces and some wide-eyed chanting, but otherwise they blend in with the flock who in turn blend into the eerily endless fields of corn. While the film doesn’t shy away from the supernatural elements of the story, its reach far extends its grasp when it comes to special visual effects to articulate the pseudo-Lovecraftian force suggested on the page. Children of the Corn is at its strongest when it sticks to that most reliable of zombie movie tropes: people – even when pint-sized – are the real monsters.
The film retains the afterimage of King’s critique of the cycle of inherited fanaticism and the way faith can be perverted into brutality when unmoored from reason or compassion but mostly sidesteps it in favour of a rural gothic tale of outsiders in peril. Linda Hamilton, on the cusp of breaking big in The Terminator, shows her star potential, even though she’s saddled with a script that treats her more as a screaming subordinate rather than an active partner to Peter Horton’s Burt.
Adequate, if unspectacular, Children of the Corn proved surprisingly fertile film territory. A modest success at the box office eventually reaped a crop of sequels, each squandering the striking imagery and visceral simplicity of the original movie, planting and replanting the same narrative field until it withered and died. It became a byword for diminishing franchise returns, but this first entry at least captures the flavour of what makes King’s small-town nightmares so effective: the fear that what looks like wholesome Americana masks ancient cruelty and hunger.
Children of the Corn endures less as a faithful King adaptation and more as a cinematic cultural scarecrow, standing in the fields of mid-1980s horror with frayed edges and a hollow chest, its creepy influences waning but still potent enough to have footed the idea of terror lingering amongst the long susurrating stalks of cornfields deep into the cultural psyche.
