Tag Archives: horror

Movie Review: Children of the Corn (1984)

11 Jun

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. 

Movie poster for Children of the Corn, 1984. A silhouetted hand raises a sickle against a blood-red sky above a dark cornfield. The title "Children of the Corn" appears in bold white text at the bottom.

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.

A scene from Children of the Corn. A group of children sit in a circle at the edge of a cornfield. A boy stands at the center. Behind him is a police officers skeleton perched as a scarecrow attached to a tall wooden cross made of dried corn stalks.

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.

Bluray 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

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Horror/Thriller May Book Club Pick: Dead First by Johnny Compton

4 Jun

From the moment the fire poker went straight through billionaire Saxton Braith’s head (this happens almost immediately), I was hooked. Talk about an inciting incident to hook us. What’s more? He survived and literally cannot die! Hell of a case for private investigator Shyla Sinclair. Millions of dollars and personal stakes are on the table.

Book cover for Dead First by Johnny Compton. The cover has a red-orange background with large black block letters spelling out the title. In the lower half, there is a dark silhouette of an isolated house with its windows faintly lit. Johnny Compton is in bright red lettering at the bottom.

I was intrigued by how the author would weave supernatural ambiguity with nitty-gritty detective noir, and I was pleased with how these genres meshed in certain parts. Mr. Braith is, of course, a mysteriously intriguing client, and how someone could see what happened with him and still logically pursue helping him is unfathomable to me. The author needed to explore that conundrum more. Instead, he chose to justify the illogical with a long-winded backstory, as a device, in my opinion, to convince the reader that it was alright for the protagonist (and us) to just accept it.

It’s all set against a Texas backdrop, and the investigation feels grounded at first, almost by-the-book, of someone choosing to follow procedure rather than dark corners clearly being exposed to her. The deeper Shyla digs into Braith’s past, the more the case stops making any kind of rational sense, so that should have told her to stop being rational.

The dialogue and character development are what make this novel strong. Remy, Braith’s loyal retainer, as I thought of him, was my favorite character.

The horror creeps gradually from the abandoned asylum to the San Antonio hotel and from the drive through Galveston. These are the places where family secrets and deeply buried rituals expose themselves.

Shyla is easy to root for in the beginning, but that faded for me when the author overindulged in backstory to justify her clear disregard for the strange in front of her. I will say, though, I love the dynamic between her and her partner Jinh. It gave the book a nice touch of humor and warmth. Their bicker-and-banter dialogue is a natural strength of the book.

Dead First was a bit of a letdown, but still a worthy novel to sink into, especially if you enjoy Noir and are looking for a bit of an edge to the classic detective tales.  

Interested in the Horror/Thriller Book Club or our Mystery Book Club? Please email reference@hobokenlibrary.org or register for our next meeting by searching under Events on our website.

Find a copy of Dead First here in the BCCLS catalog.

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Written by:
Sean Willey
Information and Digital Services Assistant

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