Before we had a video machine, he'd do the job himself, faithfully retelling the plots of things he'd seen the night before on TV. This is before the universal dread of "spoilers", a time when, if you missed a movie when it was in the cinema, and then missed it on TV, you missed it until its next broadcast and that was that, and I remember how in my teens, when we finally did get a video, I'd still scour the listings every week looking to see what films were on, hoping to find one I wanted to see. He'd recount the entire plots of The Omen, or Bug (the 1975 one about the fire-starting flesh-eating beetles, not the 2006 William Friedkin film of the same name, which, bloody hell, I probably need to write about because that's quite good), or the denouement of the episode of Doomwatch where Toby Wren cuts the wrong wire and gets blown up (poignant more because it's lost). And my dad enthused about Children of the Corn, which is a film I never saw, but which I nonetheless remembered exactly. I still remember my dad pausing and putting on a deep voice, to say: Malachi, he wants you too.
Well, OK. Not exactly. The memory of my dad's dramatic retelling of this film fired my imagination. And maybe that's why I decided it was probably an important film to include. And truly, of all the straight horror films in this project, Children of the Corn is the most successful franchise-starter, with six sequels in the bag.
I rate Stephen King as a writer. He's got an economy, but also a sort of humility, an empathy. He's unpretentious and straightforward, and hence often not given then respect he deserves. Reading The Stand was a big part of the process of my growing up, and even now my favourite part is the character of Harold Lauder (who, lest we forget, is described as looking a bit like King himself), and who is an early literary example of the toxic nerd who won't allow people to like him and gets consumed by hate and misanthropy, decades before the fedora wielding "incel" became a thing. It's easy to assume that King is going to read like every book with a black cover and the AUTHOR'S NAME TWICE AS BIG AS THE TITLE, but he's so much better than the other big name horror writers of that 70s and 80s heyday of Big Horror Novels.
If King's long form novels have a flaw, it's that they're often a bit too long, but that's because he's obviously more interested in people and their stories, and it's interesting that in the books where he jettisoned horror altogether, you don't miss it, because the horror was what you came for, but it's not what you stayed for.
It's that human element that makes his work so ripe for cinematic adaptation, and yet which so rarely makes it onto the screen. I wonder King's famous dislike of Kubrick's The Shining is down to how chilly a film that is; everyone loves The Shawshank Redemption but my personal favourite King adaptation is David Cronenberg's The Dead Zone (and Cronenberg gets a bad rap for making chilly, inhumane films, but you only have to watch them to see there's a keen eye for humanity there)
And like all the best stories, it makes you think about toxic religion and the pointless waste that ideology forces you into, and like the best horror stories, it's really fucking disturbing. And the combination of that social and political element, combined with the backwoods cult (with a vaguely Lovecraftian flavour which is something I talked about last week), and the corn dollies and crucifixes and outsider art, makes it an essential folk horror text.
And that's important to think about when considering the film, Children of the Corn, because there are so many ways that this could have been so much better. But it isn't.
While the basic structure of the story is intact, with Burt (Peter Horton) and Vicky (genre queen Linda Hamilton) discovering Gatlin by running over a kid who had already been murdered, and then falling foul of its juvenile inhabitants, the heart of the story is very different.
That's not necessarily a bad thing, and I push back hard against the idea that an adaptation needs to be slavish. But a really good adaptation should preserve the point of a story. The film has a happy ending, of sorts, and that's OK, but the idea that this is something big, and old, that's going to continue to consume generations of people who should be innocent, that's gone.
Job (voiceover): My dad went to call my mom. He was still worried about Sarah.And the gratuitous pre-credits massacre that immediately follows strips nearly all the tension from the film. The plot where Burt and Vicky discover what happened becomes superfluous. The revelation is something we knew.
Job's dad (getting up and walking to the phone): I'm going to call your mom.
The film, with its big 80s musical score and its flat, ham-fisted direction, keeps doing this. There's this scene where Vicky is hoisted up on a corn cross and she comes face to face with the dessicated corpse of a police officer, except that this guy has been prominently placed in the background of a couple of scenes already, and so when he's revealed, he's not actually revealed, since we know what he looks like. The monster is a bump under the ground and a red cloud that swallows people and spits them out as zombies, and can be beaten by a brushfire.
Of course, the older kids are played by adults, and their leader, Isaac (John Franklin), who is a really creepy looking little guy, is clearly having the time of his life declaiming the cod-fundamentalist lines, but he's also 25 years old and looks every day of it. Courtney Gains, playing vicious psychopath Malachi, is about 20 here and does look like a teen, but he's just a bit wooden, frankly. Having said that, the immortal line "Outlander! We have your woman!" would probably defeat much better actors.
Someone who knows cinema better than me suggested last night I also watch Disciples of the Crow, a short adaptation of the same story made in 1983 by student filmmaker John Woodward (you can find it on YouTube). This was one of King's "Dollar Babies", where he'd sell the rights to his stories to young filmmakers for a buck, which is another reason to love Stephen King, frankly. And this film gets the feeling of the story much more completely than Kiersch's low rent blockbuster. Sure, it has no monster (and can afford none) but the feeling that this is something ongoing, something that can't just be destroyed by setting a fire, that's there.
And thanks for making the campaign a success. I appreciate it.
