Cover Charge #6: Children Of the Corn

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. He Who Blogs Behind the Times

It's the return of Cover Charge, Ticketholders!

The numbering of this post is kind of serendipitous, as I published the last issue of Cover Charge at about this time of year, six years ago, and it was a review of Stephen and Owen King's Sleeping Beauties. Also, six is a number that will come in threes when I drop my review of all eleven movies in the Children Of the Corn series on Halloween.

And speaking of special days, today just so happens to be Friday, October 13th, so please remember to keep your mirrors intact, avoid ladders and any felines that are hard to see in the dark, don't spill the salt, and most importantly, comment at the bottom of this post, Become A Ticketholder because I know you haven't already, help out my ad revenue as you read, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest kernels of news on my corntent.

Three things have famously been said of Stephen King's writing:

First is that he can describe furniture with the same level of detail as any other writer devotes to their entire cast of characters.

Second is that The Dark Tower is his magnum opus.

Third is that he is (usually) a master of making the mundane scary. Thinner did it for dieting, Misery did it for toxic fandom, It did it for clowns, sewers, and bullies, Christine did it for cars, Needful Things did it for thrift stores, and Dreamcatcher tried to do it for toilets, among other notable examples. But did "Children Of the Corn" do it for--duh--children and corn? Let's find out!

Originally published in the March 1977 issue of Penthouse (cover shown above with some...editing) before being included in his anthology collection, Night Shift in 1978, "Children Of the Corn" is a short story following the troubled married couple of Burt & Vicky (no last name given) as they road trip their way to California in 1976 to save their marriage and visit Vicky's brother. But because this is a horror story about a bickering couple on a road trip through the Venn diagram intersection of the Corn Belt and the Bible Belt, and they wouldn't be able to watch Jeepers Creepers for another twenty-five years, they get lost in Nebraska, take a wrong turn, and accidentally run over a boy in Quakerish attire named Japheth, prompting them (but especially Burt, who is a selfish, self-assured, stubborn-to-the-point-of-horror-movie-stupidity asshole) to drive to the fictional town of Gatlin for help.

Because of the kind of horror movie this story is riffing on and because Burt is how Burt is, he completely ignores Vicky's constant statements of empirical fact (Japheth's creepy, cornhusk crucifix,

the ancient, underinflated prices that would make modern consumers shit their own faces, the state of disrepair and eerie quiet of the town, the corn-focused religious fanaticism on display, Vicky's own troubled childhood in a religious family, the feeling of being watched, Japheth having been murdered before they ran him over,...) and leaves her trapped in their car to get kidnapped and sacrificed while he does historical research and plays word games in a re-denominated church with a picture of Corn-Haired Jesus on the altar.

Though the chosen literary medium doesn't allow King the page count or word count to go all-in with his usual descriptive style, he does enough to get the couple's personalities across and build an air of mounting suspense, mystery, and terror. We know it's a "torture and kill the traveling couple" story, and the creepy kid angle is right there in the title, but we can also feel the isolation and paranoid fear of Gatlin and its surrounding corn fields dripping off the page with growing intensity as we read on to the hopeless finale.

However, the lore behind what is happening in Gatlin proves to be a bit suspect, considering what we are told in the story's epilogue.

While exploring the former Grace Baptist Church, Burt finds log books of names and dates, seeming to hint that in 1964, a young preacher calling himself Isaac (that name will be multiply important to remember later, but Burt focuses on a boy named Amos when he's exposition-dumping to us through an imaginary conversation with Vicky) convinced the other children of Gatlin to slaughter everyone in the town who was at or beyond the Age Of Favor (that would be nineteen, a number you might remember having significance in King's Dark Tower-related books, as well as in his life, post-accident) as a fertility offering to a corn-based god (or God Himself?) he calls "He Who Walks Behind the Rows."

For a story titled, "Children Of the Corn," we get very little page time devoted to them, so that "making children scary" part isn't really achieved here. Yes, they take Vicky and sacrifice her; and yes, they chase Burt through Gatlin and into the cornfields, but they don't feel like the real threat in their namesake story.

The corn, though? The corn is its own character here. It's just unexplained enough, yet explained in so many ways that it is terrifying. "Stephen King makes corn scary" might sound like a ridiculous thing to say, but it's also true; at least, in the story.

In the beginning, when Burt is examining Japheth's body, he expresses a feeling of being watched, and we don't know for sure if it's the children watching him from the corn, or if the corn has eyes as well as ears (sorry). When the children are chasing him through the corn, Burt feels like it is protecting him and leading him somewhere, hinting that it may have some kind of pheromone control over his emotions and sense of direction (almost like some kind of Happening). But when the corn does lead him to where it wants him (to the "clearing at the end of the path" where Vicky and everyone over the Age Of Favor in Gatlin have been sacrificed--that's a quote from The Dark Tower, not "Children Of the Corn," but it seems somehow very right for the scene), Burt gets a glimpse of He Who Walks Behind the Rows before his death, and it's a hulking green shape with red, football-sized eyes. Maybe. It's never stated in the short story whether He Who Walks Behind the Rows is the red-eyed hulk, or the corn, or somehow the creature and the corn, or some ethereal entity that uses the creature as a familiar to oversee and fertilize the corn while it spreads its awareness through the crops and the town, or if there's a Thinny (another Dark Tower concept--basically Marvel Incursion points between Mid-World, Earth, and more terrifying planes of existence) in Gatlin that let the creature assert its influence over the town, or any number of other explanations. And knowing some of the powers of your villain, but not the full scope of the villain itself is ideally terrifying.

Before I talk about the epilogue, I'd like to share a Mandela effect with you that colored my opinion of the story on this re-read, and stuck me with a very negative opinion of the first movie when I watched it for the first time as a young man in college.

As a child, I was obsessed with dinosaurs. In middle school, it was the Goosebumps series. But after Carnosaur (the book being better than the movie is a massive understatement, and you should go read it when you're done here) and Jurassic Park brought my literary tastes to a more mature level, I spent most of my free time in high school gluttonously digesting Robert B. Parker and Stephen King to the point that my English teachers would look at my weekly reading diary and write me notes to please, for the love of variety, read something else! And one of those books was Night Shift. I think I finished the whole book over the course of a week. So because I read it at such a pace, I developed this false memory of the ending of "Children Of the Corn" taking place inside the church, with the children watching as the floor cracked open and Burt was consumed by a giant, Lovecraftian worm-god. And when I watched Children Of the Corn for the first time, I remember being disappointed that they couldn't get the giant worm scene into the film.

I had the same, "wait...what? Where's the giant worm in the church scene?" reaction when I re-read "Children Of the Corn" for this review because it just has Burt being led to the clearing where he finds Vicky dead on a cross, sees the green, red-eyed mass rushing to eat him, and end scene, fade to black. That was the digital edition, and I own a physical copy of Night Shift, so like most of us do when we get Mandela'd, I read the story again in my own, physical used copy, and it was the same as the digital one, word for word. I then Googled the ending as I had it pictured in my mind, and after some more reading through my copy of Night Shift to corroborate the search results, I realized that I had mentally tagged the ending of the "Jerusalem's Lot" short (also about a traveling pair who fall victim to a small town, pagan murder cult) onto "Children Of the Corn" because imagination is much cooler than reality.

As for the epilogue, it begins with a title drop as the Children Of the Corn gather in the clearing to assess the sacrifice of Burt and Vicky, and get the latest word of He Who Walks Behind the Rows from...Isaac?

Wait.

The ledger said that Isaac (originally William Renfrew) was born on September 19, 1945 (9/19, and the digits of 1945 add to 19, so there's that Stephen King numerology again!). All children are supposed to surrender themselves to the corn at the age of nineteen. Which matches with his September 19, 1964 death date from the ledger. Vicky tells us (Burt, but it's also exposition) that the story takes place in 1976. And there's no mention (in the ledger entries that we are shown, so maybe a logical way out of this mess?) of any other children named Isaac. So Isaac would be thirty-one in the story's present. Why is Isaac only nine? Why isn't Isaac dead?

Whatever the case, with barely a page left, we are introduced to Malachi (remember that name for Halloween!) and Ruth as Isaac states the Age Of Favor has been lowered to eighteen to compensate for their lazy, eldritch fertility god having to kill Burt itself. Ruth (shown in the ledger to be fourteen or fifteen) is carrying Malachi's baby, and Malachi is eighteen.

Now, there are state-by-state Age of Consent statutes to consider, but even with that and the "it's only a four year age gap" and "it was a different time" excuses, this is gross.

But it also ends this bleak story with a glimmer of hope as, having watched Malachi sacrifice himself to the corn, a pregnant Ruth secretly plots to someday burn the crops and put an end to He Who Walks Behind the Rows.

So to wrap up, "Children Of the Corn" had great atmosphere, an unsettlingly mysterious, elemental villain, and concise character building for the lead couple. But only half of the promised, titular threats are given sufficient horror presence, the plot is formulaic and could have been resolved by a certain character not being a horror-movie-stupid asshole chauvinist, and the timeline is shat to pieces by the last-minute revelation of Isaac.

C-

If you'd like to see my thoughts on a slightly better franchise where a maritally challenged man named Burt fights giant worms, check out my review of the first five Tremors movies, and as always, please remember to comment below, Become A Ticketholder because I know you haven't already, help out my ad revenue as you read, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest kernels of news on my corntent.

Pagemaster,

Out!