Children of the Corn (

1984

) ½

It always surprises me the extent to which Hollywood is allowed to mischaracterize huge swaths of the country. The American South and Midwest bear only a passing resemblance to reality when they show up in Hollywood movies, being either endless expanses of dull gray wasteland or backwards hellscape populated by savage cannibals. Were a foreign nation mischaracterized in the same fashion that the American South and the American Midwest are, I don’t think we would ever hear the end of it from virtue-signaling cultural commentators. Today’s film is far from the worst example of this trope, as at least it does not depict the entire region as if it were infested with a sub-species of gap-toothed, racist, sodomites. All the same, it reaches the point of absolute absurdity at times, especially when it tries to mine the endless cornfields themselves for a sense of horror and isolation. The movie tries to treat cornfields the same way films set in the wilderness treat dense forest or jungle. One has to wonder if director Fritz Kiersch knows that a cornfield is not a natural phenomenon. If there's corn growing that means that someone planted it. Sure, the farmer might be out of earshot and the rows of corn stalks do provide a bit of cover, but its hardly the same feeling of isolation that one gets from the actual wilderness. Seriously, how much of a coastal elite do you have to be, to be terrified by cornfields?

The film only gets more absurd when you start to consider the backstory. Three years ago, in Gatlin Nebraska, all the children in the town simultaneously rose up and massacred every adult they could get their hands on. All this was done at the behest of some monster that had recently settled in the town’s cornfields, a creature the kids call He That Walks Behind the Rows. The revolt was led by an unfortunate-looking boy named Isaac who claimed to hear the voice of the monster and declared that he was the only one fit to deliver the creature's laws unto the rest of the kids. Isaac was assisted by an equally ugly ginger kid called Malachi who served as the prophet’s chief enforcer. That a bunch of kids, if they were properly armed and motivated could kill every adult in town with a coordinated strike is believable enough. The problem arises when you consider the logistics of most small towns in the Midwest. There is just no way that a whole town's worth of people (and Gatlin seems to be a substantial town, at least judging by the shots of the downtown area that we see, it probably has at least a couple thousand residents) could disappear off the earth without anyone noticing. Sure, Nebraska is not exactly the most densely populated part of the US, but even so, there is no town so remote that everyone could be killed off without someone outside getting wise to it. The citizens of Gatlin aren't homeless heroin junkies, they presumably have relatives living outside of town who are going to get worried when they don’t see their son/daughter/niece/nephew/cousin for a couple of years! For god’s sake, the nearest town is only a scant 20 miles away, are you really telling me that for three years nobody wanted to make the 15-minute drive to have lunch in a diner in Gatlin? I've lived in a small Midwestern town, and on nice weekends it's not at all uncommon to drive across the county to go out to eat somewhere different. One really has to wonder why the film insists that all the adults in town have been dead for three years, especially when the filmmakers don't have a younger set of actors to play the kids in the past. So in addition to all the plot holes this opens up, we're left to assume that Job, Sarah, Isaac, and Malachi have not grown or aged at all in three years. The least they could do is make it more reasonable and tell us that the children's uprising happened a month or two earlier. This would give Isaac ample time to set up his theocracy and at least be somewhat believable that the outside world hadn't managed to catch onto what was happening in Gatlin. Moreover, I wouldn't expect any of the kids to look noticeably different after a scant couple of months as opposed to a few years.

Our story picks up three years later when the newly minted doctor Burt and his girlfriend Vicky midway through a cross-country road trip to Burt's new hospital internship. After an excessively twee introduction scene where Burt and Vicky coo together a hotel room, the couple hit the road and pass through Nebraska. As fate would have it, this is the exact moment that Joseph, one of the kids living in Gatlin, decides that he's had enough of Isaac's theocratic state and tries his luck skipping town. He doesn’t get far before he’s ambushed by Malachi who slits his throat and props his corpse up in the middle of the road to get hit by the next passing car, which just so happens to be Burt and Vicky. One has to wonder what exactly is Malachi’s plan here. Surely he could have easily killed Joseph and buried his body in the cornfields. Nobody would ever think to look for the body, as it is Isaac and the rest of the children who are tending the fields. Moreover, if nobody noticed the complete eradication of every adult in Gatlin, then surely nobody is going to notice Joseph's passing. Why leave the body in the middle of the road and bring extra attention to the town? A couple of state troopers poking around near Gatlin would quickly uncover the truth of the town, and a quick radio for backup would give them more than enough forces to restore order to Gatlin. Isaac's enforces are only armed with sickles and knives (which is in-and-of-itself surprising, as you would expect that a town in rural Nebraska would have a couple of guns lying around) and would be easily dispersed with a couple of warning shots. One could make the argument that Malachai is just trying to stir the pot, after all, he's not exactly happy with the way that Isaac is running his little kingdom and is of the opinion that he could do better. The only problem with this is that later on, Malachai deposes Isaac with hardly any effort at all, so why bother trying to bring in outside aid? Moreover, Malachai never tries to recruit Burt and Vicky to his cause. As far as I can tell, his leaving Joseph's body in the road is either just an act of stupidity or a plot hole.

Obviously having Joseph make his escape at the same time Burt and Vicky are passing through is a coincidence and a bit of a plot contrivance. This, by itself, is no big deal, a lot of stories, especially goofy horror stories, rely on a coincidence or two to get the action rolling. I'm more than willing to forgive this so long as the story keeps it to a minimum or delivers in some other area (creative gore, tense suspense, memorable characters, etc). Yet, Children of the Corn starts to pile contrivances upon this initial contrivance. After discovering Joseph's body, Vicky and Burt stop at a gas station and try to phone for help. The old man has no phone and warns the young couple against seeking help in Gatlin, telling them to go to the next town over instead. The old man is in cahoots with the kids and is being kept around because he provides them with a steady supply of gasoline. After Burt and Vicky leave, Malachi and his aids ambush the old man and kill him. Why does this happen now? The kids still need his gasoline and there is nothing to be gained by murdering the old bastard at this point. It would be one thing if he tipped Burt and Vicky off but as far as I can see he was only following the instructions that the kids gave him and telling them to give Gatlin a wide berth. The murder seems to only exist so that we can have another bit of bloodshed at this point in the film, which is a lame excuse. At least have this play into the existing conflict between Malachi and Isaac, that would at least cause the film to make sense.

Children of the Corn is at its best when it is being completely ridiculous. When the camera cuts to scary angels of corn stalks, and the soundtrack blasts out some absurd pseudo-Latin chanting I’m genuinely having a good time. Likewise, any moment where Isaac is onscreen delivering his over-the-top performance can be counted a good a moment. The actor’s mere physicality is impressive, he looks genuinely creepy and menacing in every shot but also is so absurd that he does not detract from the overall goofy atmosphere of the film. John Franklin should be commended for his performance in this role, he’s absolutely fantastic and so convincing as an ill-formed child that I didn’t realize till I looked him up afterward that he was a 20-something at the time (his short stature just the result of a deficiency of growth hormone). The special effects when He Who Walks Behind the Rows turns up to devour his sacrifices is also just downright delightful. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such an absurd special effect passed off as a genuine menace before, and I’ve seen The Creeping Terror (1964)!

The problem is all the stuff in this movie that isn’t those brief highlights. For every scene with Isaac berating his second-in-command for insufficient zealotry, we have three of Burt and Vicky wandering around the deserted town, wondering why everything is festooned with cornstalks. The film has the usual problem of movies that have been adapted from short stories have: there just isn’t enough plot to fill 90 minutes. As a result, the whole thing is tortuously stretched and padded with all sorts of unnecessary asides and additions. Is it really necessary, for instance, that Sarah has the ability to predict the future in the form of crudely drawn images? It doesn’t really impact the plot at all, and just adds to more clutter story. About the only thing we get out of it is a few creepy images to hold over the opening credits.

Yet if Children of the Corn was merely a slow film with a few flashes of cheesy brilliance I don't think I would hate it as much as I do. For me, the biggest issue is the wasted potential. The central concept of the film is unusually sound. Indeed, it’s the same premise as the deeply disturbing Who Can Kill a Child? (1976) which had a couple come to a strange island seemingly only inhabited by children. However, the earlier film kept the couple completely separate from the society they were peeking in on. There was no helpful child that explained to them what was going on or what had happened to the island’s adults. The result was a feeling of deep confusion and alienation, with the couple and the audience feeling at an uncomfortable distance from the society of the island. We were left to wonder what had happened here, and question what these children were really capable of. Children of the Corn could easily have a similar vibe, but it torpedoes it right from the start by giving Burt and Vicky a pair of kids to act as their collaborators. Job and Sarah, just by the virtue of existing, dispel much of the tension of the situation. Moreover, the pre-credits sequence where Isaac seizes control of the town dispels any mystery about what transpired in Gatlin before the events of the film.

Not only does the film squander its unique premise, it completely botches the theological implications it's trying to establish. Indeed, every attempt that the filmmakers make at satirizing religion results in a complete failure. Sure, the language that Isaac employs is straight out of the old testament but the ideas that are underlying them are obviously pagan. This is a god that demands regular human sacrifices to sustain itself. Even someone with as dim a grasp of Christian doctrine as me can tell you that the closet thing Christianity demanded to a human sacrifice was accomplished 2000 years ago. If you're going to mock Christianity, it's important that the religion depicted here at least resemble Christianity.

The film Children of the Corn, and the story it is based upon, illustrate to me the main difference between Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft. More significant than their different degree of success, sanity, or place in history is the cosmological order of their horror stories. Sure, there are all manner of ill-intentioned cosmic monstrosities lurking in King’s oeuvre, hell this film has one of them in the form of He Who Walks Behind the Rows, but the nature of reality in his stories is fundamentally different than in Lovecraft’s tales. King’s fiction always has a hero, usually an authorial self-insert, who stands up to the menacing supernatural forces that surround him. Not even the bleakest of all King’s work could be described as “hopeless” in the way that damn near every Lovecraft story is. That’s because the heroes of Kings work, flawed as they may be, are ultimately not a part of the same dark cosmos of gods and monsters. They are reflections of how King sees himself and his rather high opinion of his own outlook. It’s not hard to imagine King on a long road trip through Nebraska, staring at the endless rows of corn and listening to the constant din of revivalist radio and growing more and more assured of his superiority over the dumb rubes that must live in this place. They are so brainwashed by this half-baked religion they’d worship any alien monstrosity that touched down, he probably reasoned.

The best comparison with Lovecraft would be The Shadow Over Innsmouth, as both are stories of outsiders visiting an isolated community only to discover it is run by a strange cult worshiping a monstrous god. In King’s story, the outsider triumphs over the cult, kills the “God” and returns to normal civilization. In Lovecraft’s story, the hero escapes the town, only to discover later that he himself was a descendant of the monstrous creatures the dwelled in that cursed town. In Lovecraft’s world, everyone is in some way tainted by the underlying horror of reality, whether they know it or not. There are no heroes, just scared and pathetic mortals trying to hide from the unpleasant truth that their existence is ultimately pointless. King’s vision is certainly more consistent with a healthy mind. It’s normal to see yourself as the hero of your own story, and common enough for writers to write themselves as such. Yet, as a result, King’s horror fiction suffers, often lacking the nihilistic punch of the earlier master.