And we are back. I didn’t quit when I watched all the Howling movies, and I didn’t quit when watching the Hellraiser movies. Let me get these corn cobs out of my ears and we will dive into the final three, to date, Children of the Corn movies. This series has a special place in horror history by becoming one of the most unlikely and longest-running franchises in the genre. Last time, we looked at the first batch of movies, the short film, and the original short story. Today, we’re looking at the final two attempts from Dimension and the final remake, released in 2023.
What do these last three movies have in common with Hellraiser? What did this series accomplish that all those other straight-to-video franchises failed to achieve? And what did the director of the last movie have to do with another famous horror author? Let’s walk behind the rows one final time as we look at the last efforts of Children of the Corn.
These three were different for me because I hadn’t seen them like I had most of the original run or the other series sequels I’ve covered. I remember the cover for Genesis, and I remember when the newest remake came to Shudder, but I genuinely don’t think I had even heard of Runaway before.
After the remake from 20th Century Fox and original producer Donald P. Borchers turned out to be nothing more than a blip in the cinematic universe, Dimension took another stab at the franchise. Not because they thought it would be good or anything, gosh no, but because it had been nearly a decade since they released the last one and they were about to lose the rights and those sweet, sweet DTV and DVD sales.
To write and direct, they looked to Joel Soisson, who had been hammering out Dimension sequels in the early 2000s. He directed The Prophecy 4 and The Prophecy 5, as well as Pulse 2 and Pulse 3. As a writer, his breakout was Trick or Treat from 1986, followed by work on The Prophecy 3, Highlander: Endgame, Dracula 2000, Mimic 2, Dracula II: Ascension, Dracula III: Legacy, Hellraiser: Hellworld, and Hollow Man 2. That’s a lot of sequels and quite frankly a ton of work in a short amount of time. While not all of those are great, you gotta respect the hustle.
The cast of Genesis is small in a couple of ways. There is a very short list of actors actually named, and most of them didn’t show up in a ton of movies throughout their careers. The one exception is Billy Drago, who follows in a long line of character actors showing up in these movies to chew scenery. I probably know and love him best from his scene-stealing turn in The Untouchables, but he was no stranger to horror, with roles in the remake of The Hills Have Eyes, Tremors 4, and the Mirror Mirror series. Of course, being the villain in The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. must be mentioned as well.
Drago plays a man named Preacher here, joined by his wife Helen, played by Barbara Nedeljakova from Hostel, as well as the main characters Tim and Allie, played by Tim Rock and Kelen Coleman. Coleman may be best known for The Office or Big Little Lies, but this was one of her very first movies. Not quite Naomi Watts or Charlize Theron, but better than I expected from this movie. Tim Rock, on the other hand, has almost nothing else on his acting résumé.
This ragtag group is joined by Duane Whitaker, who fights Billy Drago for the title of That Guy in this movie. Whitaker was a ’90s video-store staple with parts in From Dusk Till Dawn 2, Pulp Fiction, Tales from the Hood, and Puppet Master 5.
The movie opens “20 miles from Gatlin, Nebraska” so that it can call itself a Children of the Corn movie and be done with it. A young soldier returning from the Vietnam War finds his house eerily quiet and his parents dead, with his father killed in a particularly corny way. He is knocked out of a window after being called a child killer and having Vietnam flashbacks before the movie jumps to somewhere in the California desert in the present day.
Allie and Tim are stuck with car trouble in the sweltering heat. To make matters worse, she is pregnant, so the heat isn’t helping. They wander to a house inhabited by Billy Drago, who says he doesn’t have a phone and can’t help them. Allie quickly shows that she is going to be an utterly unlikeable character. With so few characters in the dang thing, that’s a problem.
Eventually, they are let into the house, where they try to use the phone while avoiding the increasingly strange behavior of Preacher and Helen.
Allie wanders off at night despite being warned not to, again proving she is the worst, and finds a shack where she has some sort of torture-sex vision. She then discovers a child locked inside a shed.
The whole movie has that glossy direct-to-video sheen to it, and it definitely uses stock sound effects and music whenever it can. While it’s quaint and of its time, it doesn’t make the movie any easier to watch. The good news is that the movie is only about 80 minutes long, including the opening and closing credits.
Tim goes looking and finds a found-footage movie on a camera. What does this have to do with Children of the Corn? Probably nothing, actually. My guess is that Soisson had a drawer full of scripts to use, and they added just a LaCroix amount of Stephen King to the movie to make it work.
The movie tries to build tension by having Tim and Allie figure out the mystery and avoid Preacher, but it turns out he is the guy from the beginning. To the surprise of no one. He then tells the story of what happened to Gatlin while he was gone, probably the part of the script he wrote to make it a Children of the Corn movie, and Allie has a dream about children in the corn killing her.
A supernatural force is keeping them in the house, and Preacher explains that the force lives off children. A delivery driver comes the next morning, allowing Tim and Allie to get out of town. That doesn’t last. The force, seemingly inhabiting the child in the shed, kills Helen with a telepathic pitchfork before causing an accident that kills Tim. The delivery driver, who was in on it, takes Allie back to the farmhouse, where she is destined to give birth for He Who Walks Behind the Rows.
This is easily the worst of the series. No slasher-like killers, no plot to speak of, and nothing really happens through the entire runtime. Its 3.6 rating on IMDb is more than earned, and I will never watch that again. I recommend you don’t watch it either. Next up wouldn’t be too much better, though unfortunately.
2018 gave us Children of the Corn: Runaway, and again, there didn’t seem to be much effort here. They did it to keep the license and even filmed it in the same damn warehouse in Oklahoma where Hellraiser: Judgment was shot so they could keep that series too. Broad overview: I was surprised by this one. But I’ll get to that in a moment.
Soisson returned to write the screenplay, but directing duties went to John Gulager, who made the more-than-dumb-fun Feast trilogy before being asked to helm the Piranha remake sequel Piranha 3DD. Apparently that was just too much for the world at large, because afterward he returned to direct-to-video fare like today’s movie and the 2024 film Seven Cemeteries.
The cast includes Marci Miller, who was also in Death Race 2050; Lynn Andrews III; Mary Katherine Bryant, who also showed up in Hellraiser: Judgment because why not; and Gulager’s father, Clu Gulager. Clu is, of course, perhaps best known to our massive community as Burt from The Return of the Living Dead or Mr. Walsh from A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge. Also check him out in the wonderful anthology movie From a Whisper to a Scream and the awesome and influential 1960s Lee Marvin movie The Killers.
The movie opens and, oh my God, are we going to get a direct sequel to the previous movie? Of course not. But in a way, I guess we are getting a sequel to the original Children of the Corn.
Ruth is getting up in years for the old cult and is also pregnant. To save herself and her unborn child, she burns the cornfield down and tries to kill the group so she can get away. What’s interesting here is that while she is giving birth, she tells the evil entity that he can have her baby.
This movie has a shockingly likable main character played by an actress who gives a solid performance. It’s a breath of fresh air compared to the previous movie and makes me think Soisson’s script maybe wasn’t the culprit after all, or at least wasn’t fully at fault. Ruth is fairly complex. She is down on her luck and moving from town to town to find work and get herself and her now-teenage son, Aaron, someplace safe.
The movie even looks like it was filmed better than the last entry, which is a welcome sight. There are even some genuinely terrifying parts, something that hasn’t been seen in this series in I don’t remember how long.
Ruth and Aaron are driving through Middle America when a voice on the radio starts speaking. It admittedly sounds like one of those Spirit Halloween box voices, but it is still creepier than anything we’ve gotten lately. They get pulled over and their truck is impounded, so they decide to stay in town for a while. It’s here that they meet Carl, who owns a car shop.
Ruth has some problems, though. The movie explores her depression and former life as a cult member, including episodes of PTSD and the way she keeps her guard up. She tries to make something of her life, but almost everyone she befriends or interacts with has some sort of crappy reasoning or ulterior motive. Well, except for Sarah, the friendly and sassy waitress who seems too good to be true and is far more charismatic than most of the characters we’ve encountered in this series. So, of course, she is going to die in a terrible way, right? You’ll see.
Ruth seems to be doing well in this place, even while watching Sarah mess with her sexist, racist, and small-minded patrons. One of them is Crusty, played by Clu Gulager, taking the mantle of character actor doing his part in this one.
Ruth keeps having strange visions and flashbacks while also running into a creepy little girl in a yellow dress. She’s probably friendly, I’m sure. Wait, she just killed an overalls-wearing local who started messing with Ruth.
That’s the other nice thing about this movie: it gets back to the slasher formula, with a kill coming just over 20 minutes into the movie. They even use practical effects in a lot of the scenes. What are we experiencing here?!
It’s two steps forward and one step back, as Ruth is confronted by a school principal who won’t allow Aaron to attend school. Part of the reason is that they don’t have an address or utility bill, but the movie also explores systemic racism. There it is. It’s nice to have the unlikeable people in these movies not be the main protagonists again.
The movie repeats this pattern. Ruth tries to do right by herself and her son and gets pushback from the universe. She goes on a date with her boss and he tries to take advantage of her. She tries to get her son into school and is called a vagrant. She tries to make friends with a nice waitress and gets her killed for her trouble.
The movie follows Ruth’s story and kills off those around her, both good and bad, before revealing that our friendly neighborhood waitress is actually a bad guy and part of the cult. She even gets pulled into a heartbreaking conversation about her past, and this woman just pretends like she doesn’t know anything. It’s wild.
Ruth confronts the little girl in the yellow dress, who has gone completely feral and killed off a bunch of adults. Sarah confronts Ruth, calling her Sandra, which was her name before.
When Ruth goes downstairs to reclaim her son, Aaron does exactly what Ruth did to her mother. He stabs her through the chin before gutting her after they share an emotional “I love you” moment. While I should have seen it coming, as previous movies have killed off their main characters at the end, I kind of thought she would be an exception.
She walks into the middle of the field and dies, and again, it’s way cooler and bloodier than anything from the previous few movies. It’s a dark ending that’s somewhat ruined by a dumb narration that also appeared at the beginning. Now Aaron is a preacher gathering a new flock of children.
The idea is horrifying, even if the execution fumbles the bag a little at the end. That’s kind of this series in a nutshell, though: fumbling a solid idea every chance it gets.
Which brings us to the final, as of 2026, Children of the Corn movie, simply called Children of the Corn. While I won’t leave you hanging, this movie blows. I will say that it’s incredible for one specific reason: this movie was released in theaters. It was only an 18-day theatrical experience beginning in Sarasota, Florida, and it bombed, making just $575,000 against a $10 million budget. But holy cow, it climbed the summit. I can’t begin to tell you how exceedingly rare this is.
The Children of the Corn series had already spanned 11 movies and a short film, with its first feature arriving in 1984. Its only other theatrical release was all the way back in 1993. Then this one was able to make it back onto the big screen. That’s something The Howling series couldn’t manage. The Prophecy series couldn’t do it. I mean, my God, the Hellraiser series couldn’t even make it back to theaters, and it had a genuinely great film come out as its most recent excursion. The fact that this movie is absolute trash is irrelevant because the theatrical release is something that gives horror in general some hope.
So how did we get this fresh hell?
In early 2020, producer Lucas Foster, who had worked on movies including Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Equilibrium, and Man on Fire, announced that this would be another adaptation of the famous King short story but would have almost nothing to do with the original movie. Boy, was he right. It also has almost nothing to do with the original short story.
Filmed entirely in New South Wales, Australia, the movie was an independent production and was therefore able to film during the pandemic without interference. It wrapped in June 2020 but wouldn’t see the light of day until 2023. You can currently watch it on Shudder, and I would like to point out that this is finally not under the Dimension banner.
The movie was written and directed by Kurt Wimmer, who has had an interesting career. As a writer, Wimmer has been working since the early ’90s and has credits including Sphere, adapted from one of our greatest science fiction writers of all time; The Thomas Crown Affair; Law Abiding Citizen; The Recruit; Salt; the Total Recall remake; The Beekeeper; and its upcoming sequel. As a director, his résumé is much smaller. He has only four films, beginning with 1996’s One Tough Bastard, starring Brian Bosworth, followed by two cult classics with 2002’s Equilibrium and 2006’s Ultraviolet.
It was while making Ultraviolet that he had such a hard time that he chose to step away from directing until this movie. Why this of all things brought him back, I have no idea. He does have something else coming out that is currently in pre-production, though, so good for him.
The cast doesn’t have a ton of recognizable names, as the series typically does. I should have known this would be an exercise in futility when there wasn’t a grizzled older character actor to hold down the fort. The closest we get is New Zealand-born Bruce Spence, who appeared in The Road Warrior, Dark City, and The Matrix Revolutions, among many other movies.
The rest of the cast includes Elena Kampouris from My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2, Kate Moyer, Callan Mulvey, and Stephen Hunter from The Hobbit movies.
This movie could have and should have been pretty good, but something was lost along the way. It has a dumb stinger ending that sets up a potential sequel that I promise we will never get, really bad character decisions, a poor script, and some less-than-great acting. Yeah, I know I’m talking about a damn Children of the Corn movie, but it’s particularly bad considering its budget and the fact that it received a theatrical release. Honestly, I think being held back for three years really hurt it.
Anyway, the movie opens with a promising hook. A young man walks by a young girl named Eden and tells her that she doesn’t have to cry anymore and that nothing really dies in the corn before going inside a home for children and killing the adults. The sheriff takes action and tries to knock the young man out with halothane gas but ends up killing him and the other 15 kids inside. Well, we did in fact have a child come out of the corn. But now it goes off the rails into something unrelated.
Eden is clearly a little messed up now, and rightly so, even if that doesn’t give her the right to be the most annoying character in the movie. The town is trying to recover as best it can.
Now, here’s where the story could have been interesting. The main character, Bo, is leaving town to pursue her education and career. She even mentions that the crops have all these chemicals and that dust from the cornfields can cause hallucinations. Does the movie roll with this and make the horror a result of the chemicals? Of course not. There is a Resident Evil 2 remake-looking plant monster that is He Who Walks Behind the Rows for this movie.
The rest of the story follows the kids in town eventually killing the adults after the adults plan to burn all the crops to get government money. The teenagers who aren’t part of Eden’s corn cult even call in a reporter to do a story about it.
Eden uses the same gas that killed the kids at the beginning to knock out the adults. For reasons, it doesn’t kill them this time. They then bury the adults alive in a scene that is supposed to be horrifying, but we don’t really care about any of these adults, including Bo’s parents.
Lots of poorly written decisions happen that make no sense, and eventually Bo burns the crops with Eden walking in to try to save her friend, the god.
Eden is the worst part of this frustrating movie, and she even gets the final stinger scene. It looks like it wants to be a dream sequence but instead needlessly kills Bo and the franchise as a whole.
There are attempts here. There are some interesting deaths and some “what could have happened” angles. Ultimately, though, it falls very short and shouldn’t really count as an adaptation of the story. It’s just another in the long line of meaningless Children of the Corn sequels.
And that’s all this is. One long and seemingly never-ending line of horror movies trying to capitalize on one singular conceit.
These last three movies really run the spectrum of a last gasp. The first one we discussed, Genesis, is such a bad movie that it’s hard to say anything about how bad it is as a Children of the Corn movie. It’s also little more than a grasp at air for Dimension to keep the rights. Runaway is too good for this series and is similar to the Hellraiser sequel directed by Scott Derrickson, where it is almost certainly going to be viewed by fewer people simply because of what it is and where it falls in the series.
Maybe the most offensive part is how badly the final entry was fumbled with its budget, attempt at recognizable actors, and theatrical release that it should have had and could have played better.
That is currently the last one. But we all know that’s only for now. There will always be corn with monsters, killer children, and the allure of putting Stephen King’s name front and center to try and draw an audience in.
After 11 failed attempts, maybe they will eventually get this story right. But for now, I’ll stay here as He Who Won’t Watch These Movies Ever Again.