Children of the Corn

1984 was not a great year for Stephen King. Over the previous eight years, six of the prolific horror novelist's best books had been adapted for the screen to monstrous success by directors the caliber of Brian De Palma, Tobe Hooper, Stanley Kubrick, David Cronenberg, Lewis Teague, and John Carpenter. Studios were clamoring for any film or TV product with King's name attached, but while the not-quite 40-year-old author's well of material was deep, it was not yet bottomless. So this year, we started to get feature films based on King's short stories. Some of these would turn out to be masterpieces, like Stand By Me, some were worked into anthologies like Cat's Eye, and others were expanded into features that played far more goofy than scary. This probably had less to do with any lack of potential in these stories as good source material and more to do with the fact that these films were not written or directed by the cinematic masters who had adapted the first run of King's books. Mid-80s Steven King movies were helped by directors like Mark L. Lester (Roller Boogie, Class of 1984, and King's Firestarter), Paul Michael Glaser (Band of the Hand, The Cutting Edge, and King's The Running Man), and Fritz Kiersch (who made his directorial debut with this film and went on to make the teen drama Tuff Turf, the dirt bike racing film Winners Take All, and the sci-fi fantasy Gor).

The movie follows a young couple driving through Nebraska who end up in an abandoned town inhabited by a cult of murderous children who worship a demon that lives in the local cornfields. King wrote an adaptation of the slim short story he first published in the March 1977 issue of Penthouse and then in his 1978 collection Night Shift. but it was not used. Apparently, King's screenplay was untraditionally structured, opening with a lengthy dialogue exchange between the story's two main characters, and the studio rejected his script, hiring screenwriter George Goldsmith to create a more standard narrative.

There are some solid 'Evil Child' performances in this movie. 25-year-old John Franklin, an actor with a growth hormone deficiency, credibly embodies nine-year-old Isaac Croner, the son of the dead preacher who has indoctrinated all the surviving children of the town into a religious cult that demands human sacrifices to a bloodthirsty deity called "He Who Walks Behind the Rows." Isaac's older right-hand man and enforcer, the tall, redheaded Malachai, is played by 19-year-old Courtney Gains, who went on to a solid career playing minor roles in films like Back to the Future, The 'Burbs, and Sweet Home Alabama (but watching this film you'd swear he was reincarnated as Caleb Landry Jones!) The lead couple is played by Peter Horton (who would go on to be one of the main stars of the popular Ed Zwick/Marshall Herskovitz '80s TV drama Thirtysomething) and Linda Hamilton (who shot this film right before she made The Terminator, and perhaps fortunately for her, that film completely eclipsed this one in the public consciousness).

Goldsmith apparently intended the movie to be an allegory for the Iranian Revolution, with a town taken over by religious zealots in much the same way the Ayatollah Khomeini roused his followers, and the terrorized couple were analogs for the American hostages held in Iran. That might have been an interesting jumping-off point, but the script is so laughably silly that the themes about the dangers of misinterpreting religious text and dogmatic behavior play as dismissable cliches—especially since the evil God the kids worship is depicted as a real supernatural force. Despite its dubious qualities as a horror movie, Children of the Corn was a substantial hit that spurned a franchise of films and TV shows, proving that the Stephen King name on a poster could sell just about anything.