Why The Children Of The Corn Movies Don't Work, According To Stephen King

There are a lot of good-to-great Stephen King movies ... and then there's the "Children of the Corn" series. Somehow, King's short story "Children of the Corn," originally published in a 1977 issue of Penthouse and added to his 1978 short story collection "Night Shift," has popped off a horde of sequels and not one but two remakes. As of this writing, there are 11 (!!) "Children of the Corn" movies. How in the hell did this happen? Well, for one thing, the first film, released in 1984, was a big hit — primarily because it was made rather cheaply. And that then became the name of the game: make quick, cheap sequels and dump them on home video (only the first two movies, "Children of the Corn" and "Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice," went to theaters).

In King's original short story, a feuding married couple, Burt and Vicky, are on a road trip to California when they end up in the small Nebraska town of Gatlin. The couple quickly finds out that all the adults in town are dead and the entire place is overrun with children who worship He Who Walks Behind the Rows, an evil deity who lives in the cornfields. This is more or less the plot used for the first movie, although King's story ends on a rather bleak note: Burt and Vicky both die (RIP!), while in the film, the couple makes it out alive. As for the sequels, well ... they go off in their own directions, and while they maintain the cult of corn-worshipping kids, they have almost nothing to do with King's original story (although I imagine he still gets a check every time they make one of these things). 

So, are the "Children of the Corn" movies any good? No, not really! One weekend, I teamed up with one of my friends to sit through a marathon of all of the "Children of the Corn" movies. This friend and I got a kick out of watching crappy movies, and we figured it would be fun to watch the series and have a laugh. Boy, were we wrong. The sequels are so uniformly lousy that it's almost impossible to enjoy watching them, even on a "so bad it's good" level. By the time we finished the films we both felt utterly exhausted and miserable, regretting that we ever decided to do this. 

That said, I do think the first film, directed by Fritz Kiersch and starring Peter Horton and Linda Hamilton, has its charms. It's certainly not the best Stephen King movie, but it does possess a creepy atmosphere that helps elevate things. King himself has voiced displeasure with the film over the years, although in the book "Stephen King Goes to the Movies," the master of horror does seem a little more magnanimous about the entire affair. "The movie version is a kind of avatar of '70s horror movies — even the spilled blood looks ready to snort coke and disco at the drop of a BeeGees tune," King writes. "But awww, c'mon ... it's not s'bad. To me, it had a 'Wicker Man'-ish feel (the first 'Wicker Man,' the good one), and Linda Hamilton, who would go on to 'Terminator' glory, certainly gave it her all."

However, at the same time, King seems to strike upon the reason why the movie and all its subsequent sequels just don't work: it's very hard to make corn, well, scary. As King puts it, reading the short story allows you to use your imagination in a way the films don't. "Sometimes the story is better simply because one's imagination is never on a budget," King says. "I think the written version is spookier, because the corn is spookier. On film, it just looks like ... corn. On film, corn is never going to give Dracula a run for his money." I think King is spot on here: the original short story, which is short and simple, is legitimately creepy because it leaves us mostly in the dark. The films, which get increasingly sillier as they go along, just can't compare. But that probably won't stop someone from eventually making yet another "Children of the Corn" movie.