The Stephen King story Children of the Corn is built around one major plot hole – and, fortunately, it is one that the upcoming prequel can elaborate on and solve. 2022 looks set to be another huge year for Stephen King adaptations. In the coming months alone, Firestarter will receive a remake, Salem’s Lot will arrive in cinemas, and the small screen will play host to an adaptation of The Institute.
However, one Stephen King project whose release has repeatedly been delayed is director Kurt Wimmer’s Children of the Corn prequel. Set before the action of 1984’s Children of the Corn, the prequel is intended to illustrate how the town of Gatlin’s creepy titular children killed their parents and became a murderous cult of corn-worshipping villains. However, despite being filmed in 2020, Children of the Corn still has no release date as of February 2022.
This is doubly unfortunate as the prequel has an opportunity to fix one of King’s most infamous plot holes. Both the original short story “Children of the Corn” and the 1984 movie note that, while the image of a town where all the adults have been killed by their kids is scary, how the children managed to hide this fact from the outside world makes no sense. Many reviews noted this issue with the movie, too, and King does not attempt to justify the plot hole or explain it away in either the story or the movie. The town of Gatlin would need to have no residents with out-of-town relatives, no business with neighboring communities, and generally a completely isolated existence for the children’s collective murder of their parents to go unnoticed — something that the upcoming 2022 prequel can explain or justify.
Most Stephen King short story adaptations are forced to explain the source material more thoroughly than the original tale since the brevity of the format allows King to avoid delving too far into the backstory. However, both the original story “Children of the Corn” and its movie adaptation are somewhat infamous for mentioning the premise’s inherent absurdity and then never explaining it, with the characters simply accepting that the sudden death of the town’s entire adult population simply went unnoticed by the rest of the world years before the story starts. Since 2022’s Children of the Corn prequel is specifically intended to illustrate how the eponymous children came to power, the movie must explain how they managed to cover up the deaths of their parents in the process.
However, it is still unclear when (if ever) fans will find out the answer to this quandary. Although 2020 was the wrong time for a Children of the Corn remake, the unexplained two-year gap between the movie’s production wrapping and its release doesn’t bode well for the prequel either. Whether Children of the Corn’s prequel will ever see the light of day is not yet clear, but for fans who want an answer to Stephen King’s most infamous plot hole, there is still some hope that the town of Gatlin’s enigmatic past may still someday be explained.
