Children Of The Corn is quite possibly the best horror concept to never make a great movie, even after a whopping 11 tries. And yes, for those keeping count, that includes the new remake, which is the second start-from-scratch effort in the series. Small “sundown” towns run by small-minded people have long been terrifying in real life to anyone deemed an outsider; making such people the smallest of all, i.e. children, is a terrifying inversion of norms and something of a social satire move. Yet the original Star Trek episodes “Miri” and “And The Children Shall Lead,” both of which seemingly inspired a young Stephen King when he wrote the short story, did it better than any of these, er, corny franchise entries have managed.
Part of the problem that sinks every filmed version of this story is fundamentally misunderstanding what’s scary about literalist religious cults. George Goldsmith, who scripted the 1984 original film, later claimed he intended it as a metaphor for the Iranian Revolution. Here’s the problem: religion inherently depends on faith and non-falsifiable claims, but the Children Of The Corn movies always make it indisputably clear that the evil deity “He Who Walks Behind the Rows” is real, and often corporeal. Zealous faith should be the real monster, but horror movies feel the need to have an actual monster, which inevitably, paradoxically, makes the titular children much less scary by comparison.
The new Children Of The Corn is set in contemporary times, so it’s not quite a prequel, but it picks up the story earlier than most. Director Kurt Wimmer, whose Equilibrium and Ultraviolet suggested a more fun and competent helming hand than what’s on display here, adds a couple of timely updates. First, the corn has been genetically modified by the totally-not-Monsanto company GrowSynth, giving the whole story a bit of an atomic-age, cautionary-tale edge. Second, for modern shortened attention spans, the monster is now simply called “He Who Walks.”
In an extremely convoluted setup, a teenage boy who’s been out in the cornfield for days goes on a rampage, killing all the adults at a foster home. The town sheriff tries to subdue the kid using a cattle sedative, and winds up accidentally poisoning all the children inside. “There goes my reelection,” he matter-of-factly exclaims. But the killer kid’s younger sister Eden (Kate Moyer) remembers, biding her time in the foster care of the town pastor, played by Bruce Spence, here adding Children Of The Corn to his resume of cinematic franchises that includes Mad Max, Star Wars, The Matrix, and The Lord Of The Rings.
Meanwhile, everyone in the town is angry all the time, since their crops basically died after they went all-in on genetically modified seeds and the farmers want a newer government subsidy program that will pay them not to grow corn. The kids, who have come to believe in “He Who Walks,” disagree, to put it mildly. Eden, who has become obsessed with the character of the Red Queen from Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, starts painting the cornstalks red. “The Red Queen makes the world the way she wants it to be,” declares Eden, who clearly hasn’t actually read Through the Looking Glass.
There’s no reason a movie with this premise couldn’t be better. Just not in these folks’ hands. Wimmer’s script feels like half-jotted ideas, with characters speaking in paragraphs of exposition and theme rather than actual dialogue. Moyer manages to mostly make it work, coming across as a genuinely bad person rather than the usual creepy, possessed demon kid. But when she turns to the camera with quips like, “He’s not laughing now,” we have to wonder: who is she talking to?
Mostly CG-cartoonish explosions and gore effects are cut around judiciously or utilized for jump scares that are so quick you have no time to see the seams. The big final twist is laugh-out-loud loony and obviously animated, so if you must see the film, at least stick around for that. Otherwise, maybe the 12th attempt to adapt Stephen King’s classic tale will be the charm.
(Children Of The Corn opens in theaters on March 3 followed by a digital release on March 21)