How this movie/Stephen King turned driving through a cornfield (a pretty boring experience, trust me, as a Midwesterner) into one of the most horrifyingly claustrophobic and isolated cult rituals I have ever seen is brilliant.
I discovered the movie while researching comparable titles to my own next novel. I always knew it existed but, for some reason, it never quite appealed to me, until I learned it was based on a Stephen King short story. That pushed me over the edge.
What makes Children of the Corn classic horror is its roots in the fear of sensory deprivation.
Burt and Vicky are driving through Nebraska when they accidentally hit a child. They swear he came straight out of nowhere. And when there are miles and miles of tall, sun-bleached, waving corn blowing in the wind, there is simply no way to tell what’s hiding inside of it. That image, simple as it sounds, is the beating heart of this film.
The two scramble with how to deal with this, and the further they go into the endlessness of the roads ahead, the more they find themselves circling nothing but corn, decimated storefronts, and evasive, guarded residents. This leads them to the ghost town of Gatlin.
But that’s just what the surface shows.
Underneath, a twisted cult-preacher boy named Isaac and his second-in-command, Malachai, run the town. No adults remain. He Who Walks Behind the Rows commanded the children to slaughter every one of them.
Thus, Burt and Vicky’s crime is a simple one: being adults in the wrong place at the terribly wrong time.
One of King’s early literary inspirations was William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, and it shows here. Children of the Corn is about the terrifying idea of a world without rules, without adults, without the structures we’ve grown complacent to. It takes one of the most ordinary and mundane American settings, a small town where a stranger would expect a friendly hello, a polite wave, and easy hospitality, and makes everything in it disturbing and petrifying.
The corn breathes alongside them, growing more unsettling with every scene.
I won’t go into the rich undercurrents of fundamentalism, cult and folk ritual, or the movie’s representation of self-imposed malicious parentification.
The movie created such a powerful dread that it spurred a new archetype for the genre: The Children of the Corn Dynamic – youth-led groups or cults that completely overthrow and control the adult population (King, 1978; TV Tropes).
P.S. Do not confuse this with the 2023 remake/reboot. The original is much more worth your time!
Reserve your DVD copy in the BCCLS system here.
Or, read the short story published in 1977 on Overdrive/Libby.
Comment below your thoughts once you’ve had a watch.
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Written by:
Sean Willey
Information and Digital Services Assistant
Hoboken Public Library Blog 