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bb-bare-bones · 2 months

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Beating a Dead Crop: A Children of the Corn Retrospective

By Tabby Knight (instagram - tabby.knight6)

Artwork by Dy Dawson @xgardensinspace

If you’ve seen all of the Children of the Corn films in the franchise (dear God) I’m both somewhat impressed and also vaguely concerned for your mental wellbeing. I counted a total of 12 entries in the series, including the 2020 reboot and the 1983 short film Disciples of the Crow. Not bad, considering Stephen King’s original short story clocks in at approximately 10,000 words, and ends with a degree of finality that doesn’t exactly invite a sequel.

For those unfamiliar with the source material, Children of the Corn was originally published in Penthouse Magazine in 1977 and later reprinted in King’s short story anthology, Night Shift (1978) and follows a young married couple who accidentally hit a child with their car while driving through rural Nebraska. Burt and Vicky, who are road tripping to California in a last-ditch attempt to save their marriage, decide to put the boy (dead) in the back of their car and drive to the nearest town, Gatlin, for help. The shock of hitting the boy has been abated, somewhat, by the fact that he was likely already dead when they went over him — his throat's been slit from ear to ear. They are a little disturbed, however, to find a crucifix made of corn husks in the boy’s suitcase.

They arrive in Gatlin only to find it deserted, and the only building showing any sign of recent activity is the church, which is defaced, trashed, and decorated with corn. Inside, Burt also finds a record of births and deaths, and manages to piece together the town’s dark history: some twelve years ago, all the adults in town were massacred, and the children appear to have created a corn-worshipping cult in their absence. Since then, every registered death in town has occurred on the victim’s nineteenth birthday.

By the story’s conclusion (Spoilers) Vicky’s been mutilated and crucified on a cross of corn, and Burt finds himself trapped in Gatlin’s cornfields, pursued — and ultimately consumed — by a mysterious entity that lives amongst the rows. It ends with the children, who are informed by their nine-year-old cult leader, Isaac, that He Who Walks Behind the Rows is displeased with their inability to dispatch Burt, and has lowered ‘the age of favour’ from nineteen to eighteen as a punishment. As a result, the town’s eighteen-year-old residents march into the corn to sacrifice themselves to their god. One of those dispatched, Malachi, leaves behind a pregnant girlfriend, who fantasises about setting fire to the corn in retribution. We end with a line that still sticks with me years after I first read it: “Dusk deepened into night. Around Gatlin the corn rustled and whispered secretly. It was well pleased.”

And there you have it. It’s not King’s best short story by any means, but it’s far from his worst, and it has its own grim, mystical charm that appealed to me as a teenager and still appeals to me now. The cult operating in Gatlin works primarily because of its elusiveness, and its ambiguity. We don’t see the children overthrow the town, we see very little of the entity that lurks in the corn, and there’s no flashy final showdown. There’s a tragedy to the children that fails to translate to the films, a quiet sort of helplessness emphasised by their final march into the cornrows. The conclusion feels inevitable – this is the way things are in Gatlin, and it’s horrendous, but it’s unstoppable. It just is.

To the best of my knowledge, none of the film adaptations manage to capture this same sense of quiet horror, the idea that those who commit such atrocious evil are themselves victim to a larger, far more powerful force that cannot be overthrown or disobeyed.

It’s a shame, then, that the very first film adaptation – a 1984 venture starring Linda Hamilton – dispatches this sense of ambiguity and dread entirely. Instead we are left with a standard, far less eerie narrative structure, in which Burt rescues Vicky, teams up with a couple of the less murderous children, and manages to set fire to the cornrows, ostensibly killing (at least temporarily – 5 sequels and several reboots, remember) He Who Walks Behind the Rows. Instead of the quiet despair of the short story, emphasised by the pregnant Ruth’s secret desire to see the corn burn, we get a final jump scare and a happy ending as Burt, Vicky, and the two kids they appear to have adopted set out for Seattle on foot.

There are merits to the first film, at least. John Franklin makes an iconic and genuinely menacing (if a little campy) villain out of Isaac, who outshines the elusive creature behind the rows as the primary antagonist. Courtney Gains makes for a memorable Malachai - morally grey and surprisingly likeable, far more fleshed out than his literary counterpart. The supporting cast of Gatlin kids are suitably freaky, at least until Sarah and Job are established as good kids, which diminishes the effect somewhat, especially when the short story did so well as to establish the children as equal parts good and bad, victims of a larger system as well as perpetrators of violence.

By creating a binary in which children like Sarah and Job are “all good,” while those such as Isaac and Rachel (the crazed adolescent responsible for that final scare) are “all bad,” we lose that sense of dread. Worse still, we lose the last remaining shred of realism in a film that has Burt pursued through the corn by a tunnelling monster right out of Tremors. As I said, we essentially lose the very point the source material is trying to convey.

That’s not to say it’s a wholly unlikeable film, of course, or that it’s universally hated by horror fans. Lots of people, myself included, look at the film with a great deal of fondness. But that doesn’t change the fact that it falls into that famed category of questionable Stephen King adaptations. It also doesn’t change the fact that it didn’t warrant a sequel, let alone five, and a string of ill-fated reboots with sequels of their own.

Horror movies and sequels go hand in hand, obviously, but unlike the other sequel machines of the 1980’s, the Children of the Corn franchise lacks the same fanatical following. When quizzed on franchises and their sequels, diehard horror fans tend to have very specific preferences. They have a favourite Nightmare on Elm Street, (Mine’s 3) a preferred Jason Vorhees (8-bit video game Jason, though I suspect I’m an outlier) and strong opinions on the superior Child’s Play film (It’s Bride). But with Children of the Corn, that level of diehard devotion appears to be lacking. I’ve met a lot of horror fans, and I’ve never had any of them tell me that Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror, for example, is the best of the lot.

I don’t want to generalise, of course, because I’m sure someone out there is getting ready to contact me and tell me of their undying devotion to Urban Harvest. I only mean that as a collective, horror fans are incredibly tolerant of sequels, and often can discuss the merits of part six over part ten. A cursory glance at cinema attendance for the new Halloween and Scream sequels alone indicates a market for the same formula over and over again. I would argue, however, that Children of the Corn doesn’t necessarily fit into that category. With the possible exception of 666, which promises the return of the first film’s Isaac, none of the sequels on Wikipedia’s handy-dandy list either catch my eye or spark my memory, and I can’t be the only one.

The question, then, is why keep churning them out? Let’s not forget that this isn’t just a case of a one-off direct-to-video sequel, or even a trilogy. We’re talking about five direct sequels to the 1984 film, plus three maybe sequels (Revelation, Genesis, and Runaway) and two reboots (2009 and 2020/23).* The obvious answer is of course, money, but you can’t seriously tell me all these direct-to-video sequels are churning out bucketloads of profits. They’re certainly not churning out rave reviews, either from critics or audience members.

My best guess is that, like me, people continue to be drawn to and affected by the original source material, and want to create a film in that same vein. But if that’s the case, why the continual failure to accurately adapt that same source material? Why create a narrative in which He Who Walks Behind the Rows is easily dispatched by outsiders, when the real terror of the story (at least in my opinion) stems from His unrelenting hold over the children, even in the face of their growing resentment?

The 2020 adaptation, much like those that have come before it, has received mostly negative reviews, with an 11% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, a 22/100 on Metacritic, and a staggering 1.6/5-star rating on Letterboxd. While I haven’t seen it myself (yet – if I do, it’ll bring my total number of CotC films up to…3) what I can glean from Wikipedia, Bloody Disgusting, and Letterboxd is that once again, the film fails to either accurately adapt the source material or, at the very least, capture the same spirit of terror the original story managed to convey.

In a perfect world, such universally abysmal reviews would signal a long-overdue death for the franchise, and I’d like to say I’m optimistic enough to hope for its end. But this is horror we’re talking about, and we appear to be in an age of unrelenting sequels for all genres regardless. And worst of all, there’s a backlog of twelve films whose very existence leave me pessimistic and cynical.

Incidentally, if you’d like to catch a Children of the Corn film that kind of captures the spirit of the original, consider checking out the aforementioned 1983 short film Disciples of the Crow. It’s not a perfect adaptation (Burt and Vicky still manage to escape unscathed, god damnit) but it goes a long way towards establishing that eerie sense of mindless violence and inevitability I talked about. It’s campy as hell, of course, terribly acted and not exactly scary, but it is only 18 minutes and free to watch on YouTube, and not too bad for a student film. At the very least, Burt isn’t pursued by a tunnelling monster as he attempts to set fire to a cornfield.

*In light of the pandemic, the 2020 rendition of Children of the Corn didn’t receive either mass distribution or a theatrical release until 2023. Interestingly, it was apparently the first film since the 1984 adaptation to even receive a theatrical release. Go figure.

#barebones #bbqueue #horrormovies #horrorwriting #80shorror #childrenofthecorn #bare bones articles

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marrrowoflife · 1 year

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The Fly (1986) - Review

Be afraid, be very afraid...

I have never written a film review in my life - or at least if I have, it apparently wasn’t worthy enough of being remembered - so keep that in mind while reading this. I’d also like to make a quick mention of the fact that I’m not entirely sure how to write a film review, so please excuse me if this is the biggest load of shit you’ve ever read. Anyways...

(Do I need to put a spoiler warning for a movie that came out nearly 40 years ago?)

I watched David Cronenberg’s The Fly about a week ago, and since then I have not been able to stop thinking about it. This film has absorbed my brain in all of its disgusting, melty, emotional and beautiful glory, and I’m not complaining, and I don’t think I ever will complain.

I’m a big fan of Jeff Goldblum (who isn’t, really?), and I can say that I agree with the people when they say that The Fly is easily his most iconic, influential, and outstanding role. I knew right from the beginning that Seth Brundle was going to be a character that I absolutely adored, which only made his utterly unfortunate outcome all the more difficult and emotional for me to sit through. I found that Seth’s kind nature and playful personality makes it extremely easy for the audience to fall in love with him particularly quickly, and watching him as he’s struggling to stay himself becomes extraordinarily heartbreaking the more the film continues on.

I’m an empath, and I find that it is easy for me to sympathise with characters no matter who they are, and this film took that feeling to the next level. There was one particular scene that stood out to me the most, and it’s when Veronica visits Seth after 4 weeks of not seeing him, only to find that something has gone horribly wrong. He is becoming a human fly. He sits her down and he explains to her what has happened before he momentarily reaches up to scratch his ear, just to then discover that it has fallen off into the palm of his hand.

“My ear,” Seth says. You can hear the fear in his voice, and your heart shatters into a million tiny little pieces, only to be stomped on, vacuumed up and thrown in the garbage when he follows it up by crying; “I’m scared, I’m so scared,”.

This film is a tear jerker in disguise as a horror flick.

The Fly made me weep, bawl, sob so hard I ended up giving myself a headache. And it wasn’t because I was scared or disturbed, (although I will be discussing how impressively horrifying the special effects makeup in this film is in just a moment), it was because I felt so sorry for everybody. Seth, Veronica, even Stathis towards the end there. Seth and Veronica’s love story has to be the most tragic of them all. Romeo and Juliet had it easy compared to these two. Veronica having to watch the man she fell in love with turn into a puss ridden, vomiting, limping, rotting insect while being secretly impregnated with his half human/half fly baby was devastating, and admittedly at times I felt worse for her than I did for Seth. And while Stathis was a perverted creep for a majority of the film, watching him get his hand and foot melted off by Seth’s - or should I say BrundleFly’s - acidic vomit for trying to save Veronica was yet another tough watch.

I could list on and on the moments in this film that saddened me, but the one that I think affected me the most was right at the very end. Seth/BrundleFly comes crawling painfully out of his Telepod, merged with part human, part fly, and part machine. He stops in front of Veronica and reaches up with one gangly, deformed hand and aims the gun she possesses to his head, begging for her to kill him. In that moment, you really stop to think about everything they went through together, and how their lives changed dramatically, even if it wasn’t for the better. It’s harrowing to watch, really. Veronica hesitating to kill Seth/BrundleFly because deep down inside she still loves him, and Seth pleading for death, a release from the monster he had become.

Anyways, to break away from a topic that doesn’t revolve around me sobbing violently; I’d like to move onto the special effects makeup.

Impressive doesn’t even begin to describe how incredibly done the makeup in this film is. Seth goes through a lot of different stages the more he starts to become BrundleFly, and each stage is more disturbing than the last. He’s pimply at first, pale with dark rings under his eyes, and unusually sweaty. It’s only when Veronica visits him after 4 weeks that you realise things have taken a turn for the worst. His skin has started decaying and his hair has begun to fall out. He’s still sweaty, and he’s starting to rely on canes to help him stand up straight. These two beginning stages are, in my opinion, the least disturbing of them all. It’s only when later on in the film, he demonstrates to Veronica how he’s learned how to climb walls and digest his food like a real fly now that his teeth no longer work. That’s when you start to get uneasy. His skin is rotting away, and he’s starting to become bloated, his teeth are beginning to fall out and he has begun losing more and more hair. The only thing that seemed odd to me was how easily he had welcomed it into his life. He seemed almost excited to show Veronica the way he eats and the way he can stick to the ceiling without falling down. I assume it’s because in his 50% human/50% fly mind, he finds it to be normal behaviour, and part of him still wants Veronica to write her book about his world-changing invention and the newly found dangers of it.

His near final form is erratic, and he is becoming more fly than human by the day. His eyes have grown black and he can no longer fit into his clothes. Even though his exterior is disturbing, his personality is the same, and he still somehow finds a way to joke around about his “Brundle Museum”, a place behind his bathroom mirror where he keeps the parts from his body that have fallen off, including his ear, his nails, and his teeth. The behind the scenes photos of Jeff being put into the makeup in this scene reveals that he was in the makeup chair for 5 straight hours. Mad respect.

The final transformation. The pièce de résistance of the film, aka, one of the most disturbing things I think I may have ever seen (yeah, I lied earlier about not being disturbed. How could you not be disturbed watching this film?). I admittedly wasn’t expecting BrundleFly to practically explode out of the shell of Seth, but hey, it was undeniably a very impressive effect. I had seen images of his final form online prior to seeing the film, and I found myself wondering throughout the film; how is he going to get to that stage? Could it be considered a plot twist that the remainders of Seth’s rotting skin was being used almost as a pod for the final form of BrundleFly to break out of? I’m going to say yes, purely because I wasn’t expecting it. I felt especially bad for Veronica in that scene, accidentally ripping off the jaw of her mutant boyfriend, but mostly because she was right there face to face with Seth when he finally turned into BrundleFly. It’s a freaky looking creature, you can’t deny it, but I couldn’t help but think that it’s mandible thing flapping about looked a little goofy, but again, I’m not really complaining.

Overall, I loved The Fly. I thought it was a beautifully tragic love story paired together with horribly revolting vomiting and body horror. I’m not really sure how to end a film review other than discussing how much I enjoyed it. Do I rate it? Do I rate the film out of 5 or out of 10? I don’t know.

As Jeff Goldblum would say;

I give it 10 Goldblums out of a possible 10 Goldblums, the only thing that disappointed me about this film was that not once did Seth Brundle rub his grubby little hands together like a little fly.

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