Sunday, October 30, 2016

Children of the Corn (1977)

by Stephen King

Children of the Corn is one of the dozens of bad films made from Stephen King stories. The story in question, “Children of the Corn,” first appeared in Penthouse magazine in 1977, one of first group of stories by the author that were published in men’s magazines and collected in his book Night Shift. As someone who lived through the seventies the story is very much of its time. It begins with a couple travelling across country. Burt Robeson and his wife are making a last-ditch attempt to salvage their marriage, but things rapidly deteriorate when they take the scenic route in Nebraska and get lost among the cornfields. Like the stories of Raymond Carver, they reflect the un-evolved nature of relationships at the time. Of his protagonist, King says, “He was gripping the steering wheel so hard his knuckles were white. He decided he was holding it that tightly because if he loosened up, why, one of those hands might just fly off and hit the ex-Prom Queen beside him right in the chops.” It was a time not so different from our own, except that that no one would write about spousal abuse today with the expectation of laughter from his audience. As Burt takes his eyes off the road to argue with Vicky he runs over something in the road, which turns out to be the body of a young boy whose throat was cut. Out in the cornfield he finds a suitcase and fresh blood on the leaves, leading him to understand that the boy would be dead even if he hadn’t hit him.

Robeson is a Vietnam vet, and keeps a shotgun in the back of his car. After Vicky gets it for him he wraps the body and a blanket and puts it in the trunk of his car, intending to take it to the nearest town. All the while, Robeson can’t escape the feeling he’s being watched from the cornfields. Turning on the radio a sermon blasts from the speakers, “There’s some that thinks it’s okay to get out in the world without being smirched by the world. Now, is that what the word of God teaches us?” It is the voice of a young man, and the kind of villain that King was drawn to early in his career, fundamentalist religious zealots whose syntax betray his New England upbringing and would be uses in novels like The Dead Zone. For Vicky Robeson, the words bring back only angry memories of her own childhood and she snaps off the sound. She tells Burt all about the many children who were “possessed” by God and used by religious leaders to win converts at tent revivals. But here descriptions sound more like freaks show carnival attractions. “She nodded at his look of unbelief. “There were plenty of them on the circuit. They were good draws.’” But all Burt can think of is a phrase he heard just before the radio went off, “No room for the defiler of the corn.” In the suitcase is a crucifix made of cornhusks and a figure of Jesus made from a dried corncob, which gives Vicky the creeps.

Once in the tiny town of Gatlin Burt is intent on finding a police station, but Vicky demands that they turn around and head back to the highway because she is convinced that there are no people in the town. Sure enough, the local coffee shop is empty, though they do hear the laughter of children in the distance. What Burt also notices is the smell. The fertilizer he was used to smelling in upstate New York when he was a boy, was somehow mingled with the smells he associated with his work as a medical orderly in Vietnam. Burt then tries the church on the corner, the only building that looks as if someone has been there recently. In the vestibule King has Burt inexplicably take the time to rearrange the letters that had once been attached to the front of the building spelling out the name of the church. Inside, along with a creepy Christ made of corn, he finds log books implying that something had happened to the crops around the town in 1964 and people were being killed as a sacrifice to God to bring back the corn—killed before their twentieth birthday. A blast on the car horn sends Burt running outside, only to find Vicky and the car surrounded by children with knives and other implements of death, and he watches impotently as they attack.

          They converged on the Thunderbird. The axes and hatchets and chunks of pipe began to rise and
          fall. My God, am I seeing this? he thought frozenly. Knives crawled spirals through the sidewalls of
          the tires and the car settled. The horn blared on and on. The windshield and side windows went
          opaque and cracked under the onslaught. . . and then the safety glass sprayed inwards and he could
          see again. Vicky was crouched back, only one hand on the horn ring now, the other thrown up to
          protect her face. Eager young hands reached in. She beat them away wildly. The horn became
          intermittent and then stopped altogether.

As the children drag Vicky out of the car, Burt runs toward her and is hit with a pocketknife in the arm. As the boy who threw it comes for him, Burt pulls the blade out and kills the boy with it. But in the time it has taken him to do this, Vicky has disappeared, one of the boys indicating she has been killed. So when the children give chase, Burt begins to run. He heads down the street, all the way out of town and in desperation, once beyond the city limits, he dives into the green sea of corn. By the time the sun begins to set, he can’t hear them chasing him anymore and begins to walk toward the road. But before long he notices that the rustling of the stalks that he has been hearing for some time can’t be the result of the wind, because there is no wind. Then, as he comes into a clearing he realizes something strange about the fields. Not only were there no bugs that he could see, but no weeds of any kind. It didn’t seem possible. As the light nearly disappears, he comes into a clearing and sees Vicky.

          She had been mounted on a crossbar like a hideous trophy, her arms held at the wrists and her
          legs at the ankles with twists of common barbed wire, seventy cents a yard at any hardware store
          in Nebraska. Her eyes had been ripped out. The sockets were filled with the moonflax of cornsilk.
          Her jaws were wrenched open in a silent scream, her mouth filled with cornhusks.

Before he can run, or do anything else, Burt hears something coming through the corn. He doesn’t live long enough to see the moon come up. At the meeting of the children of the corn the next day, it becomes clear that whatever is killing the children is not the other children. When the children reach nineteen they simply walk into the corn at night and never come out again. Those of childbearing age gave birth and then walked out into the corn when they were of age. And the cycle continues.

“Children of the Corn” is a classic King story, ordinary people out of their element, meeting up with the inexplicable. One of the things that King was always impressed with was the idea of the monster that was never seen. In this case the children were attempting to appease the monster by allowing them to kill those who grew to adulthood. Or perhaps the monster had already killed the adults and created the town of children in the first place. Anything a reader can imagine, he always said, is much more frightening that what a writer can put on the page. But more disturbing is the idea of how religion twists the minds of children before they ever reach the age of understanding. This is something Vicky has vivid recollections of, episodes that have left a bad taste in her mouth ever since childhood.

          That’s what’s so monstrous about the whole trip. They like to get ahold of them when their minds
          are still rubber. They know how to put all the emotional checks and balances in. You should have
          been at some of the tent meetings my mother and father dragged me to . . . some of the ones I was
          ‘saved’ at.”

Later, when she refuses to go into the church, the revulsion is clear. “I haven’t been in a church since I left home and I don’t want to be in this church and I don’t want to be in this town.”

The truth is, the story works almost better without the presence of the supernatural in the form of He Who Walks Behind The Rows. The story has been compared to Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” and with good reason. The delusion of religion is fertile ground for those who don’t have a complete grip on sanity. And religion provides them with something akin to a state sanctioned justification for their delusions. As such, the supernatural belief in sacrifice that is the underpinning of all Christian sects can be easily transferred to the real world and murder rationalized away by the religiously unhinged. Combine that with the perversion of childhood that has been written about in numerous stories and novels, turning childhood innocence on its head and making it evil, and the evil the men do becomes more than enough to sustain the horror King was after. The small, isolated town is also something that H.P. Lovecraft was fond of using, though King’s New England seems a much more likely location that the Midwest. And the one aspect of the story that strains credulity is how the town could stay isolated for twelve years.

The coda that King ended the story with is not only the creepiest part of the story, but somewhat titillating with children becoming pregnant and committing what amounts to suicide before they turn twenty.

          And that night all of those now above the Age of Favor walked silently into the corn and went to
          the clearing, to gain the continued favor of He Who Walks Behind the Rows. ‘Goodbye, Malachi,’
          Ruth called. She waved disconsolately. Her belly was big with Malachi’s child and tears coursed
          silently down her cheeks. Malachi did not turn. His back was straight. The corn swallowed him.

The film version of the story didn’t hit the screen until 1984. King himself wrote the original screenplay, which was basically an expanded version of the story. The emphasis was on the two protagonists and an expanded history of the children. But King’s screenplay was abandoned in favor of one by George Goldsmith that was more of a conventional horror story. It did build on one aspect at the end of King’s story, where Ruth expresses her dissatisfaction with the cult. “Ruth turned away, still crying. She had conceived a secret hatred for the corn and sometimes dreamed of walking into it with a torch in each hand when dry September came and the stalks were dead and explosively combustible.” In the film Goldsmith had Burt and Vicky survive long enough to join forces with Ruth and Job to defeat the cult. The film spawned a lengthy series of equally tepid films as well as a recent TV movie, but none capture the shock and paranoia of the original. Stephen King’s “Children of the Corn” is ultimately a story in the classic King vein that, while not necessarily one of his best, is certainly entertaining.