Donald P. Borchers, producer of the 1984 adaptation of the Stephen King story Children of the Corn and writer/director/executive producer of the 2009 film based on the story, has returned to Corn territory to executive produce a new adaptation of the source material... and this Children of the Corn comes from a filmmaker I never would have guessed would make a Children of the Corn movie. It was written and directed by Kurt Wimmer, who is best known for the awesome 2002 sci-fi thriller Equilibrium.
Wimmer’s Children of the Corn isn’t a straightforward adaptation of King’s short story in the way the ‘84 and ‘09 films were. Instead, Wimmer took some of the ideas in the short story and used them to build his own story – one that, for the most part, is basically like a prequel to the scenario King told about. In King’s story, a couple on a road trip enter a town called Gatlin, Nebraska to find that it’s entirely populated by children. Children who massacred the adults to appease their god, a creature that lurks in the cornfields and is known as He Who Walks Behind the Rows. Since King’s story was set after the massacre, the ‘84 movie just gives a glimpse of the massacre at the very beginning, a sequence that is one of the most popular and unsettling parts of the movie. The ‘09 film skipped the massacre completely. But Wimmer’s movie focuses heavily on the build-up to the massacre, which begins just before the halfway mark of the 92 minute running time.
This movie also happens to be set in a town called Rylstone instead of Gatlin, so it could easily be seen as just another chapter in the Children of the Corn franchise rather than a remake or a new adaptation. Plenty of the Children of the Corn sequels that were pumped out by Dimension Pictures were about children going after adults in different locations (Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice, Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest, Children of the Corn: The Gathering, Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror, etc.), so this fits right in. You can call it Children of the Corn all over again, but it’s Children of the Corn Part 11 as far as I’m concerned.
But whether you want to consider it Part 11 or not, Wimmer’s movie is a really good Children of the Corn movie. It gets off to a bumpy start, with a youngster who tends to spend all night in the cornfield going on a rampage in a children’s home, killing all of the adults. His rampage is stopped when the local sheriff pumps an animal sleeping gas called Halothane into the building... accidentally killing fifteen of the children who resided in the home in the process. A survivor named Eden (Kate Moyer) wanders through the corn for four days before being found by the authorities and adopted by a pastor played by Bruce Spence from the Mad Max franchise. Then there’s a time jump, and that’s when things get interesting.
We find that the corn crops in Rylstone are rotting and dying, and it seems the deals the farmers made with “big corn” to fill the fields with herbicides and GMOs are to blame. Now local Robert Williams (Callan Mulvey) has secured government subsidies where the farmers will get paid not to grow corn. Earth-movers will bury the rotting crops and the age of corn will be over in Rylstone. Which is a fix that doesn’t go over well with Robert’s daughter Boleyn – call her Bo – played by Elena Kampouris. Bo had been planning to go off to college to study microbiology so she could return to Rylstone and save the crops. The decision also doesn’t go over well with Eden and her little pals, who spend a lot of time out in the corn. And Eden says there’s someone... something... out there. Something called He Who Walks. Bo doesn’t believe in He Who Walks, but she does put together a questionable plan to get the adults to re-consider taking the government subsidies, and she recruits Eden to help her. Which turns out to be a terrible idea when Eden and the other children she has convinced to follow He Who Walks take their judgment of the adults much further than Bo could have imagined.
Something I really liked about this Children of the Corn is the fact that it digs into the drama before it gets to the horror and the supernatural. Wimmer does a good job of getting across the reality of the situation in Rylstone, of a town being dragged down by its dying crops. There’s even a reference to toxic fungus growing on the crops, a fungus that can cause sickness and hallucinations. This fungus could explain the behavior of the children, and was presented as possible explanation in Children of the Corn II as well... but this possibility never pans out, because these movies always make it clear that He Who Walks (Behind the Rows) actually is real. But the build-up to the chaos the He Who Walks followers cause is quite interesting, and the action is fun when all hell breaks loose. Every step of the way, the two leads – Kampouris as our heroine Bo and Moyer as the homicidal Eden – turn in very impressive performances.
This Children of the Corn has some stumbles here and there, like the awkward beginning and a ridiculous final jump scare. And while I liked how it handled the drama of the situation overall, it did drop the ball a bit when it came to Bo’s interactions with her mother – which barely exist, even though it’s shown that her mother’s cheating is making her dad miserable – and her brother Cecil (Jayden McGinlay) – which basically stop once the murders start, even though Bo is trying to stop the murders and her brother is following Eden. More could have been done there, but the oversight didn’t do much to lessen my enjoyment of the movie.
I have always been a fan of the Children of the Corn franchises, I have had fun following it through all the sequels and reboots/remakes/new adaptations, and I was entertained by this new entry as well. I would rank Kurt Wimmer’s Children of the Corn as one of the better Children of the Corn movies. A step above several of the sequels and the 2009 film.
This movie took a long road to its wide release. It was filmed in Australia in 2020, with the producers taking health precautions to make sure the production didn’t get shut down while most other productions in the world were being put on hold. It was then given a theatrical release in October of 2020, but in just two theatres in Florida. And since then, fans have been waiting more than two years to find out when they would have a chance to watch this new Children of the Corn. Thankfully, RLJE Films are giving it a new theatrical release on March 3rd, with a digital release to follow on March 21st. Kurt Wimmer’s Children of the Corn is finally being set loose in the world, and it was worth the wait.
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