Children of the Corn (1984)

Let me say up front that I am not the biggest Stephen King fan in the world. In fact, I might hate him, if only in that impotent way that derives mostly from jealousy. I mean, what about Thomas Ligotti? Where's his fame and fortune to match his twisted imagination, huh? Sure, King has his moments, and the man is a quite simply a master at coming up with high concepts that move copies like nobody's business, but his writing just feels so amateurish to me, especially now that he's old and out of touch with the things he's trying to depict. It feels like the literary equivalent of white trash, regurgitating ideas seen in films like The Wicker Man and Blood on Satan's Claw but with zero subtlety, and with constants asides related to whatever King was into at the time it was written: direct references to favorite musical artists and TV shows, weird misogynistic comments, weird sex, and an overall lack of focus. He is a master at filling up pages with nonsense, nonsense those that read his books as a teenager will never remember later on when they're gushing about them to their children, but concepts like subtlety and subtext are totally foreign to him, and he feels like a popcorn entertainer in that way. Clearly his heart has always been in the right place, but I think his early success made him lazy and too confident in his shaky prose. But whatever: he's widely known and appreciated, and I've only ever finished a single first draft of a novel because I'm lazy and nearly as unfocused as King's artistic vision... Hey, I have an idea, let's watch this sweet folk horror film I found. It's quite famous, I've heard, and comes highly recommended from basically anyone and everyone who finds the term 'film' to be an awkward replacement for 'movie.' Yes, audiences who balk at the idea of rewatching a movie they saw decades ago, but will still recommend in a heartbeat. It's called Children of the Corn and... 

Oh, no. My god. "Stephen King presents?" No, I won't do it. You can't make me. I have inalienable... 

Children of the Corn is a folk horror slasher film from 1984, adapted from, I think, a story from Arabian Nights, that follows a young couple who become stranded in the town of Gatlin, Nebraska and may or may not soon fall victim to a cult of evil children that inhabit the town, led by the mysterious Isaac and his bruiser, Malachai. They supposedly kill because of a deal with an eldritch god (and for a successful corn harvest no less) but without spoiling too much, that aspect of the film doesn't really make a whole lot of sense.

Let's get real for a minute, dear readers: this is a film remembered mostly for its opening scene, which is far from masterfully constructed. If you were a child when you watched this, or at the very least a very unimaginative adult, sure you'd think this was the scariest shit ever, but I'll remind you this was created in the eighties. The film feels more like something from the fifties with its Hitchcockian shots of knives descending and ascending again with no blood spray or penetration angles, and the way this sequence is edited further strips it of any impact it might have otherwise possessed, though the fact that we're confined to the cafe and only hear clues about what's happening elsewhere is fairly intelligent from a horror perspective. Still, the scene isn't enough to carry the next hour and fifteen minutes.

Let's start out with stuff I liked, then. I thought that the use of real locations added a lot to the visual texture of the film. It looks very midwestern gothic and totally works in that sense up to a point later in the film. If visuals are all you need in a film, it may be worth recommending simply for that reason. Oh, and Isaac immediately stands out as uncanny, though he doesn't get up to much during his limited screentime. Umm... and I guess Linda Hamilton is pretty good in it? Annnnnd... er, the transfer from Arrow Video looked amazing on my TV? 

Alright, alright, that's enough. The film, despite a nice spread of entertaining moments that keeps it from dragging too much, also feels quite clumsy, as though it was being made up on the fly. Cliche is embraced at every turn: why do they kill that old guy that runs the gas station and his dog? He's an old man; how long has he lived there safely, only for the evil cult to wait until the very day our protagonists happen to swing by to murder him in cold blood? A line of dialogue attempts to fix this later on, but this is very clearly working backward from a desire to have 'that scene' where you have the protagonists talk to a local that cryptically warns them to stay away, and then have that local get killed by something offscreen that we aren't privy to.

The film cares not for the subtleties of filmmaking, that much is clear early on - most glaringly in the characters and their arcs. They miss an opportunity a mile wide when they have Linda Hamilton's character constantly have to play second banana to our lead dude (can't remember his name, and can't be bothered to look because he was just the worst) who acts as though it's his world and everyone else is living in it. The film then decides the best thing for her is to get kidnapped and used as bait for most of the rest of the film, when it seems obvious for her to have to step up to the plate and rescue his pompous ass instead. Speaking of that pompous ass, at one point he manages to make short work of the film's primary threat, only to immediately spin on his heels and plow right into a post and incapacitate himself, which hardly endears him, this coming just before he seemingly forgets for one lengthy scene of exposition that he probably ought to be out looking for his wife, like, right then. The villains aren't any more intelligently conceived either though, and the end result is a film that seems to be messily spinning its wheels, struggling to fill time in between set pieces that aren't all that great to begin with, and grabbing low-hanging fruit from wherever it can to get this shit over with already.

And that's before you get to the worst bit. Like many bad horror films, it becomes a monster movie in its third act and oh my god is it ever embarrassing. The effects here may be similar to some of the cheesy opticals I've praised elsewhere, like in Eyes of Fire, but they are given such a focus here, like everything is building up to them, and they're put on this absurd pedestal, only for the resulting effect to look truly awful and awkwardly framed with the action. It definitely feels like something made lazily with assurances that something awesome would be added in later that would make it all work, but what they got is like nothing I've ever seen before in its cheapness, considering this film played in theaters. It's actually quite something to see: every bit of tension violently and noisily evacuating a film in the space of a few seconds (not to mention any chance of a recommendation based on visuals alone,) but it's hardly a comfort to those who were hoping for something... I don't know, actually good? Something that lives up to the promises made by King fans all over the globe. This film is constantly brought up when folk horror is being discussed, but ends up being a wonderful demonstration of pop culture osmosis gone wrong: there's this idea of what Children of the Corn probably is and how scary it is, versus what it is in reality and what's actually on the disc, so to speak. This probably isn't helped by all of its sequels, as they lead inevitably to conversations about this film actually concerning about ten different films that everyone mixes up into one.

So what's left to talk about? Well, nothing major. The film has a few places where it uses awkward voiceover to remind us of something that happened earlier; you know, the kind of thing a film that has no respect for an audience's intelligence would do. Acting is uniformly not great. Malachai does a pretty good job, but then he screams "Outlander!" and it all falls apart. Isaac is great but barely gets any chances to shine, and we learn almost nothing about him. Lead dude was, again, alright, and Linda Hamilton was at the very least alright. That old man sucked, but his dog turned in a masterful performance so it kind of evens out. Oh and the soundtrack is poorly conceived and sounds more akin to an eighties score knocking off the seventies with a touch more electronic synth, with choral chanting thrown in as a way to at least pretend it fits what we're seeing on screen. In fairness, it isn't bad for what it is, but what it isn't is folky, natural, rural, or any of the things that would connect it intrinsically to the film's actually (mostly) quite solid visuals. And, holy fuck, what an ending: we get one of the worst final jumpscares I have ever seen, which resolves like a damp squib, and then the text "THE END" awkwardly fades in onscreen without any sort of musical cue underscoring it, while our characters look around in confusion, mirroring my own confusion at how you could possibly fuck up such a simple horror cliche.

But hey, maybe you'll find something to recommend the film if you're a Stephen King fan... oh, wait: they hate anything and everything that doesn't cohere to King's 'vision' of what his stories should look like onscreen (apparently turning in a script where the first thirty pages or so were the lead couple arguing in a car) and tend to question the point of adaptations like these, so I'm not sure who the film is for. Perhaps just folk horror academics like me and those who read this blog, but as someone who had to sit through this crap, I would have a hard time ever recommending anyone else not only sit through it but especially purchase it on blu-ray as I did. Still, as I mentioned, it has its redeeming qualities, and fans of B-movie shlock may find something to love buried deep within. For me though, I found the film to be a massive waste of time: a concept that would barely fit a short film, stretched to feature-length and adapted as plainly as possible, but with enough ineptitude to cause it to fail even as a pop horror film.