Warning: Spoilers ahead
A young couple encounter a strange town in rural America, populated by violent children…
First published in 1977, Stephen King’s short story Children of the Corn tells of a juvenile cult who murder adults in the name of a rustic deity called He Who Walks Behind the Rows. This folk-horror tale has been the seed for an entire harvest of movies – some fairly faithful adaptations, others shlocky spin-offs that use the barest fragment of the idea – so in a new blog series I’m taking a look at these on-screen iterations. There will be famous faces and bigger budgets to come, but we actually start with an obscure short film produced under very interesting circumstances…
By 1983, Stephen King was a major author with several blockbusting novels on his CV. Cinema versions of his stories were also being made with something approaching regularity, often directed by star names: Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976), Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), David Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone and John Carpenter’s Christine (both 1983). But as well as high-end Hollywood fare, King wanted to encourage new filmmakers. So he came up with a scheme called Dollar Baby, which gave independent directors the right to adapt one of his short stories for a nominal fee of $1. One director who jumped at the chance was a young Frank Darabont, who much later in his career made three successful studio movies based on King material (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile and The Mist). Dollar Baby gave him the chance to produce a short called The Woman in the Room.
But the project we focus on here is the first official adaptation of Children of the Corn: a 20-minute short called Disciples of the Crow, written, directed and edited by John Woodward.
We start in Jonah, Oklahoma, in October 1971. (The source story is set in the fictional town of Gatlin, Nebraska.) A small boy, Billy (Steven Young), is worshipping in a cornfield; a spooky scarecrow watches on impassively, a crow circles above. Later, disgusted by the loose morals of their parents, and in thrall to a god called He Who Walks Behind the Rows, Billy leads the other kids in the town in massacring all the adults… We then cut to a decade or so later. Burt (Gabriel Folse, wooden) and Vicky (Eleese Lester, decent) are a young couple who are driving through the sparsely populated Oklahoman countryside on their way somewhere more exciting. Their bickering distracts them momentarily, however, and they run over a child. He’s dead on the road, but they quickly realise that he had already been stabbed. Distraught, confused and fearful for the consequences, Burt and Vicky explore the nearby town, which is seemingly deserted. But then several children appear, led by a grown-up Billy (played now by the film’s director), brandishing weapons and a savage intent…
With only 20 minutes to play with, plot and character work are only sketched, but this is more a mood piece than a fully-fledged story – and on that level it succeeds. Made on a low budget but with a certain amount of style, Disciples of the Crow creates and maintains an unsettling tone throughout. Woodward smartly controls lots of macabre iconography, the sound effect of rattling wind, atonal incidental music, implied violence (sometimes cheated via witty editing) and the wide-eyed panic on actor Eleese Lester’s face in order to build a spooky, threatening world and situation. You *fear* these children, feel they have immense power, which is quite a trick to pull off in a short film.
However, what’s most striking about Disciples of the Crow today, other than how competent it is as a piece of horror filmmaking, is how familiar everything feels in retrospect. The year after this short was made, a bigger-budget, 90-minute movie adaptation of Children of the Corn came along. Visually, tonally, spiritually, the 1984 film shares an awful lot with its small-scale predecessor. But we’ll get into that in more detail in the next review…
Eight prophets will emerge from among you out of 10
Next: The first feature film…
Ian Farrington 