Stephen King’s 1977 short story “Children of the Corn” is about a couple who, while driving through rural Nebraska, hit a child on a remote highway, after which they find themselves in Gatlin, a strange, seemingly deserted town that they gradually learn has been taken over by the town’s children, who years ago slaughtered all the adults and worship a demonic presence that lurks in the nearby cornfields. Fritz Kiersch’s 1984 film version of King’s story is about a town in rural Nebraska where the children slaughter all the adults, and years later, a couple happens into it after they hit one of the town’s children on the highway.

The plot elements of the short story and movie are essentially the same, yet the difference between the two versions is immense. King’s story sets up a mystery that is gradually revealed, whereas the film, which was written by George Goldsmith, shows us in the first scene (which is, admittedly, gruesomely effective) exactly what happened to the town’s adults. Thus, when the film’s protagonists, a young doctor named Burt (Peter Horton) and his girlfriend, Vicky (Linda Hamilton), find themselves in the middle of Gatlin, we know exactly what they are in for. The only lingering mystery is why the children killed all the adults, which gives the film some traction and suspense, but not nearly as much had Goldsmith kept King’s structure intact.

This does not mean that Children of the Corn is entirely lacking in horrific pleasures. Despite being made on a shoestring budget of around $800,000 (apparently, a huge chunk of the intended budget went to King for permission to brand the film “Stephen King’s Children of the Corn”), it has a grim effectiveness and plays its unsettling premise to the hilt, which perhaps explains why, of all the films adapted from King’s works, this one has produced the most sequels (10 and counting, including two remakes). The performances are not to be discounted, either. Although Peter Horton (a few years from his career-defining role on the television series thirtysomething) and Linda Hamilton (the same year she created the iconic character Sarah Conner in James Cameron’s The Terminator) make for fairly bland protagonists, the under-17 set provides plenty of disturbing undercurrents, particularly John Franklin as Isaac, the evangelical leader of the kiddie cult, and Courtney Gains as Malachi, the evil-eyed enforcer. Franklin, who suffers from a genetic condition that made him look like a child-adult at the age of 24, is particularly unnerving in the way he channels righteousness-gone-bad (the image of him glowering through the window of a diner as his underage minions prepare to massacre the adults is the film’s single most effective moment).

Yet, the reworked structure that eliminates the mystery of what is happening in Gatlin saps so much potential tension that is hard to not see the film as something of a letdown in the way it replaces mystery with spectacle (it also gives us way too much time to wonder why, after several years, no one outside of Gatlin has seemed to notice the death of all the adults). Kiersch, a commercial director making his feature debut, does what he can with a limited budget, and at times he demonstrates a Hitchcockian flair for suggestion, although the wheels unfortunately come off in the spectacular climax that finds the unnamed demonic presence, referred to as “He Who Walks Behind the Rows,” being comically embodied in some poor rotoscope effects (much better is the suggestion of its presence moving rapidly under the dirt between the rows like a giant mole). The lack of budget is apparent throughout the film, although the location work in several small Iowa towns that are stitched together in the editing to create a seamless whole gives it a realistic vibe. The cinematography by Brazilian-born João Fernandes, who had spent most of the 1970s shooting pornography (including Gerard Damiano’s infamous Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones) before shifting gears in the mid-1980s to low-budget action fare like Missing in Action (1984) and Red Scorpion (1988), is largely functional, although the film does benefit from some arresting shots of the endless cornfields at sunset.

Children of the Corn was one of the first feature films to be based a Stephen King short story, rather than one of his novels, but it would hardly be the last. In fact, the 1978 collection Night Shift in which “Children of the Corn” was included (a copy of which is conspicuously present on the dashboard of Burt and Vicky’s car), also contains the stories that formed the basis of the television miniseries Salem’s Lot (1979), Cat’s Eye (1985), Maximum Overdrive (1986), Graveyard Shift (1990), Sometimes They Come Back (1991), The Lawnmower Man (1992), and The Mangler (1995). None of those films were as successful as Children of the Corn, which despite its budgetary restraints, became a decent hit at the box office, earning $14 million, which is roughly 18 times its production budget. It never topped the box office charts, but it played steadily, remaining in the top 10 for more than a month and then enjoying a long life on home video and cable television (which is perhaps why all but one of its sequels have been direct-to-video). Where so many other movies adapted from King’s enormous body of work have come and gone and been forgotten, Children of the Corn has stuck around, perhaps because it is so elemental in the way it digs into the uncanny dread of the terrible child run amok.

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