Everyone knows Children of the Corn. Maybe you know it from Stephen King’s short story, the first movie, or one of the many references to evil kids that inevitably includes someone saying “Malachai” in an evil voice. But how many movies are actually in the Children of the Corn series? Without looking, go ahead and take a guess. Three? Five? Eight?
There are 11 feature films in the franchise, along with a short film that I’m sure very few people know about. But who were these movies actually made for? Are any of them good? What studio tried to make a run of the series both theatrically and straight to video? And who are the multiple future stars who showed up in the sequels, following the tradition of Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp? And, perhaps most importantly, what does original author Stephen King think about all of this?
Gather around as we look for He Who Walks Behind the Rows and take a trip through the Children of the Corn series.
For this article, we’re looking specifically at the original run: the movies that started with the 1984 original and ended with the 2009 remake. There’s a nice full-circle moment there, with plenty of whatever the hell Dimension thought it was doing sandwiched in between.
I had already seen the first six films over the years as they showed up on multi-pack DVDs and Blu-rays, while the rest were easy enough to hunt down on Tubi, Pluto, or various free and paid streaming services. I decided to rewatch everything because, just like when I talk about books and their movie adaptations, I felt it was necessary to go back to the source material for context.
We’ve already done pretty in-depth videos on the first two movies, so I won’t get too deep into the weeds, or cornstalks in this case, but it’s important to see where this strange series began.
Children of the Corn was a short story written by Stephen King and first published in Penthouse in 1977. It was later collected in his 1978 short-story collection Night Shift. And it really is a short story. The version in my copy of Night Shift is only 30 pages.
The story follows a married couple, Burt and Vicky, who are dealing with marital problems while driving through rural Nebraska. They run over a body in the road and report it to the nearby town of Gatlin. There’s just one problem: Gatlin has been a dead town for more than a decade. Burt discovers that the children of Gatlin killed all of the adults, while the town registry indicates that nobody lived past the age of 19. The children, dressed in Amish-like clothing, pull Vicky from the car and chase Burt into the cornfield. As Burt wanders through the corn, he finds Vicky’s desecrated body displayed on a cross before being killed under a harvest moon by the area’s demonic entity, He Who Walks Behind the Rows. The next day, Isaac, the seer and leader of the children, declares that the new age is 18 and that the children must multiply before that evening. Malachai, who killed the boy from the beginning of the story, walks into the field with the other 18-year-olds.
And that’s where the story ends, with the corn surrounding Gatlin apparently pleased. For such a small story from the King of Horror, Children of the Corn has had some impressive staying power. It has even been referenced in It, The Stand, and 1922. The movie series, however, has even stronger legs.
Before getting too deep into this thing, I wanted to give you my ranking. I want to hear where I’m wrong and why one of you thinks Part 5 is the best straight-to-video horror movie of 1998. For me, even though I’m not crazy about it and never have been, it starts at the top with the original. My ranking is:
Yes, they mostly get worse as they go along. And yes, it was torture to watch them back-to-back and in a row. Now, back to the main course.
What many people don’t know (including myself before I started researching this) is that there was a Children of the Corn short film made in 1983 called Disciples of the Crow. It runs around 19 minutes and was seemingly one of the “Dollar Babies” that Stephen King would option to film students for just $1, although I couldn’t find anything confirming that for this particular film.
It follows the basic story to a degree, but there are some major differences. Instead of the harvest deity, the ending features a Crow God, and both members of the couple survive. It’s free on YouTube, so I recommend checking it out if you’re a Children of the Corn completionist.
The first real installment was Children of the Corn, released in 1984 and starring Linda Hamilton, R. G. Armstrong, and Peter Horton. It was directed by Fritz Kiersch. It’s a decent early-’80s horror movie that follows Stephen King’s story fairly closely, although the ending is considerably more uplifting in execution.
The movie also made a good amount of money theatrically, bringing in almost $15 million on a budget of just $3 million. It’s also notable because the first movie was co-produced and distributed by New World Pictures, Roger Corman’s company.
Normally, when a horror movie becomes successful, you’d expect the sequel to go into production almost immediately. Not Children of the Corn.
Children of the Corn wouldn’t get a sequel until 1992, when Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice hit theaters internationally in the spring. American audiences had to wait until the following January. Oddly enough, Roger Corman and New World didn’t jump on making a sequel. Distribution rights instead fell to Dimension and Miramax around the same time they acquired Hellraiser.
A script was written amid concerns that Stephen King wouldn’t like what they were doing with his material. Spoiler: He wouldn’t like any of these movies.
Originally called Deadly Harvest, the sequel follows the events of the first movie, with a nearby town adopting the children of Gatlin. A reporter and his son visit the town for work. The reporter sees the children and their tragedy as a possible story that could save his career, but he and his son end up staying in town for several reasons while the murders begin again.
Its tone is all over the place, and it made around $7 million on a budget of just over $1 million. Well, that’s not exactly theatrical money. So Dimension did to the Children of the Corn series what it would eventually do to Hellraiser: send it directly to video. To be fair, direct-to-video horror was pretty popular in the mid-’90s.
The second movie may have been called The Final Sacrifice, but it certainly wasn’t the final entry. Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest followed in 1995.
This movie at least made an effort with its special effects, which were supervised by the amazing Kevin Yagher. Dimension also seemed to know exactly what it wanted from its straight-to-video endeavors. The movie was directed by James Hickox, brother of the late, great journeyman director Anthony Hickox. While Anthony had plenty of fun B-horror movies under his belt, James didn’t have another directing credit that we’d go into here, although he has had a successful career in other roles throughout the film industry.
The movie was written by Dode Levinson, who had written the fourth entry in the Angel exploitation series the previous year.
This was pretty par for the course for Dimension, which rarely struck gold with its writer and director teams, even if Scott Derrickson eventually emerged from its Hellraiser series. One other important thing to note: This was Charlize Theron’s first movie role, and she was uncredited.
This is also where the series basically says, “Screw it.” There’s the town of Gatlin. There’s He Who Walks Behind the Corn. But there’s almost no mention of anything from the previous two movies, and there’s no real effort to establish continuity going forward.
Two boys whose corn god kills their abusive father are fostered by a family in Chicago, hence the Urban Harvest title, and the movie eventually devolves into a slasher.
The poster is cool, and I remember seeing it at the video store, but this is where the series really started becoming generic and feeling like a placeholder for a franchise whose rights needed to be kept alive. The poster even got some schmuck to say, “Move over Freddy and Jason,” which is hilarious considering both the state of slasher movies in 1995 and whatever the hell this series was becoming.
I will give it credit for a decent body count, some fun kills, and some good effects. Ultimately, though, it’s a forgettable excursion into ’90s horror. Straight-to-video movies were crazy popular and profitable in the ’90s, though, so the release schedule was about to get much closer together.
At this point, Dimension wasn’t just distributing this vegetable of a series. They were producing it. As soon as filming was completed on Part 3, Part 4 began, again with no rights to characters from previous entries. I find this funny because it’s not like continuity mattered in the other movies anyway. Now Dimension was essentially making an anthology series. As long as they had the name Children of the Corn and a new subtitle, in this case The Gathering, they were set.
Stephen Berger and Greg Spence were hired to write the movie, with Spence also getting the chance to direct after working on several other Dimension films. Spence would later direct The Prophecy II, another horror sequel for the company, which he also wrote.
In front of the camera, this one paired a genre stalwart with an up-and-comer. Karen Black co-stars as Naomi Watts’ mother. Watts plays Grace Rhodes, who returns to her hometown of Grand Island, Nebraska, to take care of her agoraphobic mother and younger siblings while working at the local doctor’s office. Children around town begin becoming sick, then start acting strangely and claiming to be other people before the murders of the adults begin.
Well, it’s got Nebraska and killer kids, so I guess it got the basics right. The movie again has some solid deaths and effects, but ultimately falls short of anything worth shouting about. That’s the problem with almost all of these sequels. They aren’t great follow-ups to an already not-overly-special original, which creates a listless and seemingly endless run of movies that feel like video-store shelf shovelware.
The next one surely would change course, right? Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror at least had the decency to wait an additional year before storming video-store shelves in 1998. Dimension slid back into distribution duties here under the Buena Vista label, with production handled by Blue Rider Productions.
With slashers enjoying another resurgence after Scream, its immediate sequel, and all the clones that followed, this movie follows six college students who get lost while traveling through middle America. Filmed in Camarillo and Oxnard, California, it continues the tried-and-true tradition of the previous sequels by having almost nothing to do with them.
It also continues another franchise tradition: finding some pretty fun actors. On the younger, up-and-coming side, we have Eva Mendes and Alexis Arquette. The veteran side gives us Fred Williamson, David Carradine, and Jason Voorhees himself, Kane Hodder, in a pretty interesting cameo as a bartender.
Writer and director Ethan Wiley probably had the best résumé of the filmmakers involved so far, having written House and House II: The Second Story and directed the second one. Since he didn’t have to tie anything to the previous film, Wiley went back to the original story for inspiration. He was also fascinated by cults, so he tried to merge those ideas. The result is about what I’d expect the fifth Children of the Corn movie to look like.
It involves a corn silo at the center of the story and has a fun, explosive finale, but again, there’s just not much here.
The movie was hilariously known during production as Field of Screams, but the title was changed to avoid confusion with the mega-popular Scream franchise. Honestly, it may have been more memorable as a standalone movie called Field of Screams. Instead, we got another sequel that didn’t need to happen in a series that didn’t need to be a franchise. It’s also one of the last genuinely watchable entries.
What happened next was Dimension giving us an early look at what we would eventually call a legacy sequel… and it came from a very unlikely source. Children of the Corn 666: Isaac’s Return was pitched by John Franklin and his writing partner Tim Sulka, who had wanted to create a sequel ever since the first movie came out. Dimension basically said, “F*ck it.” No, really. They were running out of ideas, so production started on the sixth entry, which was actually intended to be the first true sequel to the original 1984 movie.
It’s 78 minutes of veteran actors like Stacy Keach and Nancy Allen appearing in a movie they have no business being in. To be fair, the director and writers do a decent enough job with the practical effects and keeping the story tight. The problem is that the whole thing meanders through plot points designed to connect this movie back to the original.
The writers were, of course, original actor John Franklin and Tim Sulka. Neither had another project after this. The director, however, has a much better story to tell. BAFTA-winning and Emmy-nominated Kari Skogland cut her teeth here before going on to direct prestige television, including The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and The Handmaid’s Tale.
Before we get to the turn of the century, let’s look at the six movies that took 15 years to arrive and ask what went wrong. And make no mistake: a lot went wrong.
First, they didn’t capitalize on the original quickly enough. Part of that must be laid at the feet of Roger Corman and New World, who released the first movie. That film remains the best-performing entry in the series. Especially in the ’80s, movies were getting franchised left and right. Something like Children of the Corn could easily have been left open for sequels. They could have gone the slasher route, something they eventually flirted with. They could have created one recurring character who appeared in every movie. Or they could have committed to an actual anthology series.
Imagine if Gatlin, Isaac, or the deity behind the corn had been the constant element while each movie told a different story around them. People who haven’t seen these movies might assume that’s what happened. Nope. There’s no real through-line between anything after the second movie.
Another option would have been to give the series another shot in theaters halfway through its run. The early ’90s had effectively killed off many of horror’s biggest theatrical heroes. Movies in the Friday the 13th and Halloween series were struggling, while A Nightmare on Elm Street got its fitting, meta finale with Wes Craven’s New Nightmare.
Before Scream and, later, Final Destination helped make franchise horror popular on the big screen again, there was an opening. Meanwhile, straight-to-video horror, particularly Charles Band’s Puppet Master series, was making a big splash with audiences and video stores. So why not take the chance? Hellraiser had already failed theatrically after Part 4, but the second Children of the Corn had made decent money on a very low budget. What would have been the harm?
If it had blown up, we might be having a completely different conversation about this franchise today. But I digress.
Part 7 would have no number attached to it. Instead, it was simply called Children of the Corn: Revelation, arriving even before its sister series Hellraiser eventually used the same title. It continued the tradition of having very little to do with Stephen King’s short story.
Michael Ironside valiantly takes on the role of a grizzled character who deserves better than this movie. It was written by S. J. Smith, who also gave us the story for Silent Night, Deadly Night 4 (and that’s a fun one, let me tell you) and directed by Guy Magar. Magar would make this his final film as a director, although he also gave us the batshit-crazy Retribution from 1987 and the TV sequel Stepfather III from 1992.
This one follows a girl returning home as the children begin turning evil. He Who Walks Behind the Corn is probably the devil. I swear, it’s like a series of successive remakes over and over again, except they keep losing more of the original plot. This one ends in an explosion, which by my count is the third movie to do that.
And that would finally be the end of the cycle. At least for now. Nobody else seemed to care enough to get the rights to the franchise. How sad is that? Even New Line, which was collecting IPs like kids in the ’90s collected POGs, didn’t want it.
Finally, a little less than a decade later, we got the 2009 remake. The loophole film, as it were. This one was not Dimension. Instead, it came from Fox, back before it became a Disney property, and was set to premiere on Syfy as a made-for-TV movie rather than another piece of straight-to-video slop or an attempt to return to the big screen.
The movie isn’t terrible. More importantly, it’s actually a remake. Or, more accurately, another retelling of the original story. So if you want the story details, go back to my explanation of King’s 30-page short story.
Behind the scenes, though, this movie gets considerably more interesting.
Donald P. Borchers, a producer on the original film, had never been happy with how that movie turned out. It took him 25 years, but he eventually secured the rights again and wanted Stephen King himself involved. If you look at IMDb, the credits, or Wikipedia, King is credited as a screenwriter. Not “based on characters from the original film.” Not simply “based on the short story.” An actual screenwriter credit.
I was shocked by this. After Dimension had gutted the series into a ho-hum future-star factory, followed by a slasher wannabe, I couldn’t imagine King wanting anything to do with it, especially considering his feelings about the original. Well, I was right. Borchers simply took one of King’s original drafts for the first movie, a much darker version, and tweaked it slightly. He sent it to King. King didn’t even respond personally. Instead, Borchers received a letter from his attorneys stating that King wanted nothing to do with the series.
After the movie was completed, Borchers sent King a DVD one last time. I guess he liked it enough to agree to let his name be attached. What a wild move from the producer.
The movie is mostly similar to the original film and short story, except that, spoiler alert, the couple is killed off like they are in the book. Good on them. And good on Syfy for giving us the best Children of the Corn movie in some time.
It doesn’t have the obligatory grizzled character actor showing up and making you wonder why they’re here. The cast is also age-appropriate for the most part, and honestly, this is the best-acted film since the 1984 original. One wild piece of trivia: the same year Orphan came out, Isabelle Fuhrman provided random extra voices for this movie.
And that’s the end of the original Children of the Corn run. Mercifully, if you ask me. These movies weren’t made for anyone in particular. They weren’t made to showcase talent, move a larger story forward, or even give us a consistent hero or villain. You had corn. You had children. And you had varying degrees of evil.
This series should have ended with the first movie. But if they were going to continue it, it should have been handled with more care.
Children of the Corn is truly one of the biggest “what ifs” in horror cinema. Instead, it mostly lives in that weird in-between period of the ’90s when horror wasn’t quite sure what it wanted to be and wasn’t producing much that was particularly memorable.
I left out a couple of later sequels and the second attempt at a remake because I have more to say about those. They don’t quite fit into the crazy narrative created by these first movies.
As it stands, the original Children of the Corn series is probably best left to completionists and King mega-fans. And if you do decide to watch all of them, take some time between viewings. Otherwise, you’ll start sprouting ears of corn and hearing the call of He Who Walks Behind the Rows.
Take care, and let me know what you think of the Children of the Corn series.