Halloween 2024: Day 14

Children of the Corn (2009)

“Have a fine son, Ruth, and raise him to love religion and to hate the world. Promise me!”

Starring Dualla from Battlestar Galactica and that guy from iZombie, The Vampire Diaries, and Alias, this is by far the most faithful adaptation of the short story. This is not, for the most part, a good thing, as watching two people who hate each other on a road trip is a particular type of torture.

I also thought it had fumbled the ball at the end and left out a pivotal piece of characterization, but it turns out that the final three minutes of the movie are hidden after the credits.

This attempt to be faithful is probably the best evidence for my stance that the short story as written is unfilmable. You just can’t convey the creeping dread of realizing that the only living thing around is endless rows of perfect, unsullied corn by filming in a cornfield.

It’s an interesting watch just to see the adaptation choices made, but it’s not enjoyable in itself and ultimately skippable.

Children of the Corn (2020)

“They ate the seed-corn, Bo. Now it’s time to pay the price.”

Straight from the most faithful to the least, this is a nebulously positioned remakebootquel that was “released” in 2020 but didn’t have a wide release until three years later. It takes place in the town of Rylstone, Nebraska in the present day, and for the first time our young evangelist of He Who Walks (no longer behind the rows, evidently) is a girl.

This certainly has the most solid cast of any of the films, and Kate Moyer’s Eden is a standout among the parade of creepy children exhorting others to kill that we’ve seen (helped by a script that doesn’t have a single “thee” or “doth” in it.)

Shame about the story, and the choice to spend so much screentime and money on an unconvincing monster that would have worked better as an off-screen menace. Much like Urban Harvest there’s potential here; among other things I could see a really interesting story of children rising up and taking righteous vengeance against adults who have traded away their future, but the filmmakers would need to commit to the bit. Instead we have a film that gestures towards several themes but refuses to choose one and run with it.