13 Nights of Shocktober: Children of the Corn (1984)

by A.J.

This is my favorite time of year, second only to Christmas. Autumn has arrived, the weather is cooling down, and October becomes the month-long celebration of scary movies called Shocktober. There are a lot of horror movies out there, but as a genre, horror is still looked down upon by some mainstream critics and moviegoers. It doesn’t help that, admittedly, there are so few quality horror movies made but, like comedy, it’s a very difficult and subjective genre. So, in the days leading up Halloween I’ll be posting some recommendations for scary movies to help you celebrate Shocktober.

Night 4: Stephen King Rules Night
"He Who Walks Behind the Rows"
Children of the Corn (1984)

Children of the Corn is not quite as iconic as other 1980’s horror classics like Friday the 13^th or A Nightmare on Elm Street, however, it is still one of those horror movies that everyone knows about, even if they’ve never seen it. The source material is a short story by master of horror Stephen King. By 1984, when this movie was released, Stephen King was an established powerhouse brand in horror fiction and horror movies;this film is billed as Stephen King’s Children of the Corn. With a budget of less than $1 million, it ended up grossing $14 million at the box office and spawned numerous sequels of drastically diminishing quality. The first and only time I saw Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice (it wasn’t) was as part of Monster-Vision on TNT, hosted by Joe Bob Briggs. The best part of that movie was the jokes Joe Bob would make just before or after the commercial breaks. I think all of the sequels may turn people away from the original, which while not a masterpiece is a scary good time.

Children of the Corn opens with shots of a quiet, empty rural town. The titles play over a child’s drawings of what has happened to the town of Gatlin and are set to creepy choral music. All the children of Gatlin have fallen under the spell of a mysterious creature that lives in the cornfields and have formed a cult to “He Who Walks Behind the Rows.” One Sunday after church, the children murder every adult in town and begin a new way of life and follow a new religion. Three years later, Burt and Vicky (Peter Horton and Linda Hamilton) are driving across the country so Burt can start a new job in Seattle. While passing through rural Nebraska they runover a young boy that stumbles into the road. They examine the body and find that the boy’s throat has been cut. They decide to drive the body to the nearest town, which happens to be, you guessed it, Gatlin.

The influence of the bloody slasher movies of the 1980’s looms large over Children of the Corn. While not graphic or gory by current standards, there is still a lot of slashing and a lot of blood. The supernatural element (He Who Walks Behind the Rows) doesn’t come into play until the end of the movie. The optical effects at the climax are visually dated, but are still effective for the scene. The climax is an exciting action centric scene, but until then Children of the Corn is a creepy, moody slasher movie. It makes the most out of a low budget: empty streets, abandoned buildings, deserted roads all build a great unsettling atmosphere. But, as you might imagine, the element that Children of the Corn utilizes most, and best, is creepy children. When Burt and Vicky arrive in the ghost town of Gatlin, there are creepy children lurking around every corner. The town is now lead by a twelve-year-old boy named Isaac (John Franklin) who dresses in black and speaks for He Who Walk Behind the Rows. His lieutenant is a teenager named Malachai (Courtney Gaines), who strictly enforces the new laws. Isaac demands blind faith from all the children of the town, but the children fear Malachai since he is the enforcer. Malachai is such a staunch believer in He Who Walk Behind the Rows that he begins to question Isaac. Courtney Gaines is probably the most memorable thing about this movie. He stands out because of his red hair, but much more so for his menacing performance.

This is a well-paced, effective horror movie that finds a good balance between atmospheric creepy horror and bloody slasher horror. It makes good use of handheld camera shots and POV shots, a mainstay of slasher movies. I’ll give you fair warning that Children of the Corn ends with perhaps the weakest final scare ever put on film, but, fortunately, this does not undo everything that came before it and is one of only a couple of missteps the movie makes. Despite all of the blood and death, this is not an especially dark or dreadful film. I was pleasantly surprised the first time I saw Children of the Corn and hopefully you will be too.