Out of all the Stephen King adaptations that have been put to film, this is definitely one of them.
Of the vast array of outcomes that can occur from adapting the work of Stephen King for the screen, Children of the Corn falls squarely in the middle. I haven’t read the short story that inspired the film, but I have a pretty strong hunch that the movie does not deviate too far from the source material. While that saves us from an outright debacle like The Lawnmower Man, I wish the filmmakers had been interested in expanding on some of the original story’s interesting elements. As it stands, the movie is fairly generic and threadbare.
If you are roughly my age, then you have probably picked up the general outline of the plot through pop culture references over the years. Unfortunately, there isn’t much more to it than a general outline. For the record, I don’t think I had ever watched the entire movie before, although I have certainly seen bits and pieces here and there. Still, in the interest of getting us all on the same page, here you go: In a small midwestern town, the children come under the thrall of some religious zealots and murder all of the adults within the town’s borders. The leaders, themselves teenagers, are the self-proclaimed prophet, Isaac, and his surly enforcer, Malachai. The plot kicks in a few years later when a young couple hits a fleeing boy with their car and enters the town searching for help. It then becomes incumbent on them to solve the mystery of the ghost town, save a couple of innocent kids, and of course survive the homicidal ragamuffins. A solid enough framework, and it all goes down just fine.
While the constraints of short story fiction don’t allow for much in the way of exposition, I was yearning for the filmmakers to fill in some gaps with their adaptation. For instance, it is revealed that the influence on the children is indeed supernatural, which makes Isaac’s claims of being a channel for a higher power more or less true. I would love to know more about what that power is, precisely, whether its the biblical Satan or some other form of eldritch terror, and what it hopes to gain through the slaughter of any adults who enter the town’s borders. Similarly, I’d be interested to understand the society that the children have built in the intervening years, and how they sustain themselves. We get hints of things, such as a ban on games and music, and a tradition of voluntary sacrifice when the someone ages out of the group, but there is a lot left on the table as far as that goes. I am totally ok with leaving some things hinted at or obfuscated, but I feel like the movie misses the mark by not providing any explanation for the why behind it all. That makes the stakes really narrowed in on the survival of Linda Hamilton and her kind of jerky husband, and I just couldn’t get that invested in their plight. There’s a way to make that mystery work by limiting the film’s point of view to just the protagonists, which would make things scarier and absolve the film of providing any explanations that the couple doesn’t uncover on their own, but as it stands we spend too much time among the titular children to learn so little about them.
Children of the Corn is a fine enough way to spend ninety minutes on an October evening, but it is far from the best way. The movie is inoffensive, but also unimpactful, and the closest it comes to being frightening is “slightly creepy”. If you are a King fan, you’ll get a tiny dose of nostalgia from the parts of the story that strongly suggest his writing, but even then, there are better representations of his aesthetic out there if that’s what you’re looking for.
Comments