Editorials
Isaac, Malachi and He Who Walks Behind the Rows: ‘Children of the Corn’ at 35
Stephen King remains as prescient a cultural force in 2019 as he was back in the 80s when a substantial body of his work was adapted to film. This year alone, there are several new properties in development or on the cusp of release (here’s looking at you, Pet Sematary). It seems appropriate, then, that one of the early seminal film adaptations of a King property is celebrating a milestone: Children of the Corn is 35 years young.
Adapted from a 1977 short story of the same name, Children of the Corn debuted in theatres on March 9, 1984. The film stars Linda Hamilton and Peter Horton as Vicky and Burt, a young couple on a cross country road trip en route to Seattle. In rural Nebraska, the pair are involved in a traffic accident: they hit a young boy who runs onto the highway with their car. In an attempt to save his life, Vicki and Burt stumble into the unusual town of Gatlin, where there are no adults and the only inhabitants are cult-worshipping children beholden to an unseen deity named He Who Walks Behind The Rows.
Children of the Corn preys on horror’s pervasive fear that children will become malevolent and turn on their parents. It’s a not uncommon theme, though it is more often relegated to a single nefarious individual (The Bad Seed, The Good Son, Orphan, etc) or there is some kind of extraterrestrial or viral element (Village of the Damned, Cooties).
Where Children of the Corn differs is in the unconventional nature of the relationship between the age groups: Vicki and Burt don’t know the children of Gatlin so they have no qualms about fighting for their survival (typically parents will attempt to negotiate or reconcile with their kids, which never goes well for them). Of course, since it is 1984, there’s an obvious gendered dynamic in the way that Kurt is more outwardly aggressive, whereas Vicki takes a shine to Job (Robby Kiger) and his sister Sarah (Anne Marie McEvoy), the sole children who refuse to follow cult-leader Isaac (John Franklin) and his right-hand lackey, Malachi (Courtney Gains).
Arguably one of the film’s most enduring and impressive scenes is its opening, in which the citizens of Gatlin exit church and head to the local diner for food. As Isaac watches from outside, wearing his trademark wide brimmed black Preacher’s hat, the children inside lock the doors and go to work dispatching the adults in a variety of gruesome ways (poison, stabbings and even a hand in the meat grinder!) In this short five minute scene, the power and influence of Isaac is laid bare, the age discrepancy between victims and aggressors is established and Sarah’s prophetic dreams are introduced.
Rewatching Children of the Corn 35 years later produces a bit of an odd disconnect. While the foundation for a solid horror film is evident, particularly the idea of murderous child cultists and a paranormal-religious antagonist who manifests in the corn, the film itself isn’t particularly memorable.
There is a lot of residual goodwill for Linda Hamilton, who at the time was on the cusp of her big break-through in The Terminator the same year. Her character Vicki, however, is unexceptional; Vicki is a fairly one-dimension character regulated by fairly traditional gender norms. For most of the film, she acts as the stand-in mother for two orphaned children and then she is relegated to a typical damsel in distress when she is abducted by Malachi so she can be sacrificed (This leads to one of my all-time favourite horror lines, when Malachi yells to Burt: “Outlander, we have your woman!”)
Horton is even more forgettable. Burt is an aggressive hot-headed bore and Horton plays him without much charisma or likeability. He’s a generic action lead…except that he’s in a horror film.
The villainous children fare best. With his shock of red hair, puberty-cracking voice and significant height difference over Franklin, Gains is memorable for a variety of reasons. As an antagonist, Malachi is an inherently hateable character whom audiences can root against, although his desperation for power and lack of patience for Isaac is surprisingly relatable.
The most striking element of Children of the Corn, however, is John Franklin’s performance as Isaac. The actor suffered from growth hormone deficiency as a child, so his height as an adult was barely five feet tall, which allowed him to play the villainous head of the Corn cult when he was 24 years old (Fun fact: he’s also Cousin It in The Adams Family). The aforementioned hat and preacher’s costume, as well as Franklin’s mature and commanding performance, establish the character as a legitimate threat to the more physically imposing adults. Isaac’s unwavering self-confidence, his moral superiority as the supposed human avatar of He Who Walks Behind The Rows and his authoritative religious hysteria is highly watchable (contrast this with the less compelling performances by Kiger and McEvoy, who are clearly novice child actors).
Thirty-five years later, it’s still a little surprising that Children of the Corn heralded the start of a ten film franchise that continues to churn out new entries every few years. Not unlike other belaboured horror franchises caught up in intellectual property loops (ie: Hellraiser), the majority of the far-less ambitious Corn sequels share only the slightest connective tissue with the original film or King’s source material. And yet, there’s an undeniable appeal in the idea of murderous children lurking in the corn rows, waiting to murder unsuspecting adults who wander into their midst.
Perhaps one day we’ll bear witness to the return of He Who Walks Behind The Rows in a film that does the premise justice. Until then, stay away from the corn if you should find yourself in rural Nebraska.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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