Children of the Corn is one of Stephen King’s most successful adaptations in terms of sequels, but it failed as a horror film and an adaptation of the original novel in terms of aesthetic merit. This project based on Stephen King’s work, however, can boast the dubious distinction of being both a near-total creative failure and a tremendous commercial success.
Children of the Corn, released in 1984, was far from a flop. On the contrary, the film grossed over $14 million, spawning ten sequels over the next two decades. The original, on the other hand, was a critical flop, and it’s easy to see why.
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Children of the Corn opens with a child narrating the offscreen massacre of an entire town’s worth of parents by brainwashed children, which is a horror classic. The credits show children’s doodles of their heinous deeds, while the rest of the sequence is primarily told through implication. This invisible violence which is more startling and powerful than the explicit shocks of other, gorier films, and the opening is an unsettling start to a film that fails to live up to its promise for the rest of its runtime.
Only a few of the children who make up the titular cult are killed. However, because the rest of the novel only introduces a trio of adult characters, there are few victims for the murderous youngsters to kill, resulting in very little drama. There’s little doubt that the central characters in Children of the Corn will make it to the finish, which leads to the film’s other fundamental flaw.
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The Night Shift, from which the film is derived has a very horrible ending, which the film fails to match. Children of the Cornlacks a satisfying conclusion due to the lack of a nasty twist. The protagonists become sacrifices slaughtered by the children at the end of the story. The adaptation would never have pulled off such a bleak ending from the start, and as a result, the apparition of the toddlers scaring grown adults seems a little ludicrous because the protagonists are never truly in danger.
Children of the Corn ends with a dreary sense of disinterest, rather than the dramatic shock of the earlier, legendary King adaptation Carrie. Not only that, but the movie’s hero gives an emotional speech about the cult being demented zealots who will accept any superstitious rubbish, only to be proven incorrect when the monster they worship turns out to be very real, thereby undermining the film’s argument.
The story of Children of the Corn is a cautionary tale about the perils of groupthink. It’s dressed up as a cross-generational horror story. However, when “He Who Walks Among The Rows” emerges and toasts Isaac, the titular cult is shown to have been in thrall to a true old horrific entity the entire time. It’s a difficult way to end the storey, and it renders Children of the Corn a colossal failure, despite the film’s box office triumph.
