‘Any religion without love or compassion is a lie…’
It’s astonishing that Stephen King’s unremarkable short story Children of the Corn spawned an 11-film franchise. This is even more unusual when considering that this very first adaptation wasn’t that great in the first place…
Burt (Peter Horton) and Vicky (Linda Hamilton) stumble across a dangerous religious cult led by Isaac (John Franklin) and his right-hand man Malachai (Courtney Gains). The twist is that all the murderous cult members are children who have brutally dispatched their parents.
There is some good stuff here. Corn fields are creepy (King obviously thinks so – he has returned to them often). Both Malachai and Isaac make for genuinely unsettling antagonists. It’s a lot of fun seeing a pre-Terminator Linda Hamilton running around the place. Heck, it’s a great concept. The finished film has the whiff of missed opportunity about it, however. I’ve never seen any of the sequels, remakes or reboots but now I’ve rewatched this one I will no doubt spend the one life I have catching up with the other entries so we shall see how they hold up. This is one ’80s cult classic that would benefit from a little more lore so I’m interested to see where the franchise goes from here.
Children of the Corn seems to have endured in the horror community, perhaps due to its link to King, and perhaps because it has become a shorthand for creepy kids, but there are much better films from this era more deserving of cult classic status.