Children of the Corn

Children of the Corn is a nice, haunting little mid-1980s horror film starring Peter Horton and Linda Hamilton ("Vicky" and "Burt") as a couple who are taking their honeymoon, or moving, or something--but, regardless, the man has just finished medical school, and for some reason, they are tasked with driving through the endless cornfields of Nebraska, with an eerie Apocalyptic sky above them that stretches on into infinity.

We have already been shown a town in a quasi-1950s Mayberry RFD timewarp, wherein the 1950s meets 1980s patrons of a diner are killed in a perfect scene that is wonderfully surreal, as their picture-perfect world is torn asunder by poisoned coffee and then killed by knife-wielding youth that looks like they belong in reform school--in 1984.

There is a sort of quasi-Omen choir of evil singing in the background, and a drab, sinister little boy, Isaac (the incredible child actor John Franklin), looking through the window as the murders go down. He is dressed vaguely Amish and exudes a weird, almost-feminine air of evil. After the credits, we have a trio of children, one of which, Job (Rob Kiger) narrates the opening. They are living without adults in an abandoned farmhouse, and the little girl, Sarah, (Anne Marie McEvoy) is apparently psychic and draws That Which Is To Be.

Cult Films and Midnight Movies

"From High Art to Low Trash" Vol 1

By

Tom Baker

The boy that escapes (Joseph, played by Jonas Marlowe) is stabbed while escaping the town of Gatlin through the fields of corn. He wanders bleeding out into the road and is struck by Horton's car. It doesn't take long for Horton to realize the boy had already been killed prior to his being struck.

Thus begins a trip into Gatlin, with the body of the boy in the trunk of the car, Immediately Horton and Hamilton make the place eerie, and deserted; the diner where the murders at the beginning of the film went down looks like it did on the day of the murders, with the possible exception of the rats crawling across the counter. They soon come upon the old farmhouse where Job and Sarah are staying. Vicki stays with Sarah while Burt goes to the town hall to investigate. There he happens on a strange ritual: a cult of children assembled, one of them carving a pentagram into his chest. he picks up a log book of such strange rituals and figures out real quick that the eighteenth birthday in Gatlin for these kids is their final one.

Harvesting Horror: The Making of Children of the Corn

The cult of children, led by Isaac, are likewise the little murder-soldiers of Malachai (played excellently by Courtney Gains, in another incomparable performance by a child actor in this film), a tall, lanky, red-headed maniacal knife-wielding menace, whose cries of "outlander" while pursuing Burt are deeply memorable.

The kiddie terror cult of Gatlin worships a bloodthirsty entity--"He Who Walks Behind the Rows"--a being seen to burrow, like one of the sandworms from Dune, just below the surface of the ground. The denouement of the film is how to destroy or at least escape such a preternatural, Satanic monster, one who has gripped the mind of the children and turned them to its sway.

It is curious that the children turned to Isaac to "lead" them, in the face of a "corn blight" and that their parents were praying, in the orthodox sense, for relief from God. Their children were hearkening back to an OLDER force, it seems an alien intelligence that was here long before the settlers and the pioneers. That intelligence, like every other strange god or brutal, bizarre deity, had to be propitiated--by blood!

The cinematography here--the deep sunlit sky, sunset, rolling fields, the entire look of the film is perfect, and the ending is even somewhat apocalyptic, conjuring a sense of supernatural menace. I won't say there aren't a few moments of pure celluloid cheese--a "final scare," a scene that seems borrowed from The Exorcist, but, as far as adaptions of Stephen King stories go (he penned this one decades ago as a short for his anthology Night Shift), it is quite, quite good, and a film that brings back fond cable TV memories of the late 1980s, when they use to air it on USA's old TV weekend horror show Saturday Nightmares, a much-loved, and much-remembered retro gem.

So grab a bag of popcorn. It's the dandelion fluff on the back of the beast. And you can eat it, air-popped, seasoned with garlic, and free from the infernal influence of bloodthirsty small-town Whatsits.

Chow.

Note: Children of the Corn can be viewed for free at YouTube. However, we've elected to just post the trailer below.