The surviving children from the infamous Gatlin cult are given new homes, but pagan deity He Who Walks Behind the Rows is soon asserting his influence again…
It took eight years for a Children of the Corn sequel to come along, by which time the rights to the material had been sold to Trans Atlantic Entertainment. The world wasn’t exactly crying out for a follow-up, but saying your movie is derived from material by Stephen King has often been a good way of selling cinema tickets – and the shlock-minded Trans Atlantic also produced the film in budget-saving tandem with a Hellraiser sequel.
The lead characters from the original movie, Vicky and Burt, are long gone – by now both actors had careers above this kind of exploitation fare – so in their place comes another pair of outsiders driving through Nebraska. This time, we get forty-something journalist John Garrett (St Elsewhere’s Terence Knox) and his son, Danny (Paul Scherrer). Predictably, they have a rocky relationship: teenage angst rubbing up against single-dad inadequacy. When John realises a big story has been happened in the area, he gets a room at a B&B run by local woman Angela Casual (seaQuest DSV’s Rosalind Allen) and does some low-energy investigating. Meanwhile, Danny’s mood improves when he hooks up with a pretty girl called Lacey who likes wearing bikinis. But unbeknown to John and Danny, the remnants of Isaac’s gang from the first movie – now including Angela’s son – are hiding out in the cornfields, talking portentously about He Who Walks Behind the Rows, and planning murder…
This is a more openly supernatural story than the 1984 film, with some very silly scenes of – sigh – sentient cornstalks attacking people. Elsewhere, there’s an attempt at a Native American subtext, dramatised via a character called Frank Red Bear (a fun Ned Romero). But as the children start killing again, the lumpen writing and mostly bottom-rung cast can’t generate much of interest or any real entertainment. And guess what? The penultimate word in the title Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice is far from accurate…
While driving past a rural town, a young couple realise that a group of children have murdered all the adults in the name of a pagan god, He Who Walks Behind the Rows…
As we covered in the opening blog in this series, the Stephen King prose story Children of the Corn was initially adapted into a low-budget short film. However, the cinematic potential of such a spooky tale meant that, sooner rather than later, a full-blown movie was bound to come along. The feature-length retelling we’re looking at here, made by first-time director Fritz Kiersch, was released a year after the short. It kicked off a whole franchise of sequels, spin-offs and remakes, and is a decent slice of folk horror.
In a terrific opening sequence, kids living in the Nebraskan town of Gatlin murder their parents and other adults, seemingly under the orders of a teenager called Isaac (John Franklin, who despite his boyish appearance was well into his 20s). A tone of apple-pie Americana descends into violence very quickly and very effectively. The scene *seems* to be graphic, though the slayings are mostly suggested via clever editing. We then we cut to a few years later, and meet young couple Vicky Baxter (Linda Hamilton, a few months before her blistering performance in The Terminator) and Burt Stanton (Peter Horton, later a star of TV show Thirtysomething). They’re driving across country so he can start a new job in Seattle, but the journey is halted when they knock over a young boy on a deserted road by some cornfields. Distraught by the experience, Vicky and Burt pull into Gatlin – but they discover a mostly deserted town, aside from a few terrifying children who worship a demonic force referred to as He Who Walks Behind the Rows…
There’s a strong tradition in the horror genre for scary kids, whether it’s the aliens in John Wyndham’s book The Midwich Cuckoos or the spate of movies about supernaturally powerful youngsters that had been released in the 15 years or so before Children of the Corn (Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, The Omen, Carrie, The Shining – the last two of which were based on King stories). These stories create tension because children who have been stripped of morality can be unpredictable, capricious and cruel. They also call into doubt one of society’s sacred truths: that we are all born innocent. But as well as using that reliable trope, Children of the Corn is also a religious satire. The shadow of The Wicker Man, another film about an isolated community in the thrall of a rural deity, hangs over the whole picture, and there are points being made about what people are willing to do for a ‘higher power’. The god that Isaac and his followers worship demands sacrifices (anyone who reaches maturity is a victim) and they believe that this will lead to some kind of nebulous truth… as well as a decent corn harvest. Vicky and Burt are the secular, rational outsiders who only see murder, not enlightenment. The film also uses something of that horror-in-the-real-world energy that had been building since Night of the Living Dead in 1968 and then ratcheted up by The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in 1974: despite its supernatural foe, Children of the Corn takes place in a deliberately ‘normal’ setting, making the violence and terror more chilling by comparison.
Stephen King himself wrote an early draft of the screenplay, but this was judged too cerebral and not cinematic enough so was ditched in favour of a more striped-down take by George Goldsmith. The result is creepy stuff, nicely directed for the most part. Whether or not Goldsmith and Fritz Kiersch had seen the short film Disciples of the Corn is uncertain, but both the short and the feature use the rural landscape and neglected town really well, creating a sense that this story is taking place in the middle of nowhere – far away from civilisation, police authorities and conventional mores. Children of the Corn’s good early work, however, is sadly undone in the final act when Burt gives a soppy diatribe about moral responsibility. (The tin-ear dialogue was referred to as ‘the Captain Kirk speech’ by the production team.) The film also indulges in some poor special effects, grasping for spectacle it can’t really afford. The director has said the budget was only $1.3 million – ‘most of which went to Stephen King’ – so perhaps we can forgive a few rough edges. A meat-and-potatoes horror film that passes the time enjoyably enough.
Ian Farrington 