Fritz Kiersch’s adaptation of Stephen King’s 1977 short story, “Children of the Corn,” was released in the US on March 9, 1984. It’s one of my favorite Stephen King adaptations (somewhere in the top ten) – and its many strengths notably include an early starring role for the amazing Linda Hamilton, seven months before she appeared in the career-shaping The Terminator. It’s also a critical entry in the US folk horror tradition, defining (along with Mary Lambert’s 1989 Pet Semetary) what American folk horror looked like in the 1980s. On the film’s 40th anniversary, here’s an assessment of some of the ways Kiersch’s Children of the Corn effectively interpreted and adapted King’s story – and a couple of the film’s missteps.
The Corn: the film successfully captures the vastness and power of the corn, a central actor in King’s story. King gives the corn agency: it “marched away as far as the eye could see”; it “surged to the edges of the road,” and it “closed” behind and over the protagonist, Burt.[1] Indeed, by the end of the story, Burt comes to recognize that he doesn’t have the power he thinks he does, that the corn has led him to the place it wanted him to go (275). Kiersch’s film conveys the corn’s power in amplifying its sounds and movements – not least, by beginning with the land. After a few seconds of an extra-diegetic eerie song, the beginning of the film offers only shots of the land and diegetic sound – the wind in the corn, crows. What we see at the beginning is dead corn and dry land, as the film starts with the drought, twelve years before the main action of the film. The living and abundant corn will dominate the present time of the film, but, at the beginning, Kiersch emphasizes the drought that will prompt the children of Gatlin to slaughter their elders. The opening of the film suggests that the land drives this sacrifice; the children and their rituals come second.
The film’s opening – the corn and land
The mural: Kiersch’s film adds a character in the child Sarah (Anne Marie McEvoy) who, along with her brother Job (Robby Kiger), resist the reign of Isaac and Malachi. Sarah, in particular, is a “seer” and can foretell, in drawings, the future. She draws, for instance, the arrival of Burt (Peter Horton) and Vicky (Linda Hamilton). The film’s opening credits play out over Sarah’s drawings, which tell the story of the children of Gatlin’s uprising against their elders, depict how their community functions, and predict the future. Sarah’s drawings anticipate, I think, the murals of Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019) and the paintings of Lord of Misrule (William Brent Bell, 2023) – and, generally, the way folk horror films use art not as mere background[2] but as a way to foreground humans’ lack of agency and signal their entrapment in a larger narrative, a ritualistic world, that compels what they do.
Sarah’s pictures
Entrapment: Speaking of entrapment, I mentioned above that, as Burt tries to escape the children at the end of King’s story, he finds himself directed by the corn, driven to the place of sacrifice, which is where it wants him to go (this is much like the way Adam Nevill represents the trees in his novel, The Ritual, as coercing Luke, Hutch, Dom and Phil along a certain path – also to the place of sacrifice). Kiersch’s film represents this human entrapment, this power of the corn, through a scene in which Burt and Vicki try to take the body of the boy they hit with their car somewhere other than Gatlin. They keep driving in circles, however, always meeting a signpost to Gatlin, and finally end up driving through the corn itself – inevitably back to Gatlin. “We’re never going to get out of here,” Vicky says (in a claim that is certainly true in the story – but, unfortunately, not in the film).
Burt and Vicky drive around the cornfields, but never away from Gatlin
The paintings: when Burt arrives in Gatlin’s church, he finds a still-sacred space that has seen its Christian iconography overlaid with the pagan. Specifically, Burt finds corn placed throughout the church – and he also sees paintings of Christ and the Virgin Mary that have been “desecrated” (from a Christian perspective) by corn. These crucial parts of the mise-en-scène represent visually what King described as “a pagan Christ” with “green hair . . . hair which on closer examination revealed itself to be a twining mass of early-summer corn” (266).[3] Both King’s story and Kiersch’s film thus exemplify what Bernice Murphy has argued is the “close relationship between Christianity and paganism” in American folk horror.[4] Indeed, in the film, Burt holds up the Bible and asks the children, gathered in the church for a ritual, whether they are “rewriting the whole thing.” And they specifically rewrite Christianity by “twining” through it a pagan worship of corn.
The Christian paintings in the church, intertwined with pagan corn worship
It’s after this effective scene in the church that Kiersch’s Children of the Corn goes off the rails a bit.
King’s story leaves the reader with a large dose of ambiguity about whether He Who Walks Behind the Rows actually exists. Near the end of the story – after he has been running through the corn, after he has found Vicky’s sacrificed body – Burt thinks he sees something green with large red eyes. His mental state is substantially undermined through the course of the story, however – not least by the fact that King makes him a veteran of the Vietnam War (something entirely erased from Kiersch’s film adaptation). And the story itself ends only with the corn: “Around Gatlin the corn rustled and whispered secretly. It was well pleased” (278). The film, however, goes all in on conjuring up He Who Walks Behind the Rows with some exaggerated special effects that destroy the realism the film has thus far effectively maintained. Near the end, for instance, Isaac (John Franklin) is sacrificed to a distinctly supernatural being.
Isaac is sacrificed to He Who Walks Behind the Rows
Finally, in a conclusion that opposes everything about the ending of King’s story – and is just inherently bad – Burt and Vicky destroy the corn and its god; they survive and – the film suggests – go on to form a nuclear family with Sarah and Job. They rescue the imperative of the traditional family from the clutches of the collective, from the Gatlin cult – which had defined itself (as many cults do) by destroying the family. The film ends not with the power of corn and the erasure of human agency (as the story does) but with Vicky carrying Sarah and Burt guiding Job – a newly constituted family walking away from the burning corn fields of Gatlin.
Notes
[1] Stephen King, “Children of the Corn,” Night Shift (New York: Signet, 1979), pp. 253, 272. Further references to King’s story will be included parenthetically in the text.
[2] See Robert Spadoni, “Midsommar: Thing Theory,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 37, no. 7 (2020), pp. 711-26, for a great discussion of the centrality of ‘things’ in Midsommar, including their moving from background to foreground. See especially pp. 713-19.
[3] For a great discussion of the role of corn in King’s story and American folk horror more generally, see Bernice Murphy, “Black Boxes: Tradition and Human Sacrifice in American Folk Horror,” Folk Horror: New Global Pathways, edited by Dawn Keetley and Ruth Heholt (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2023), pp. 127-40 (p. 131).
[4] Murphy, “Black Boxes,” p. 131.
