There’s a remake of Stephen King’s Children of the Corn in the works, and that’s not a bad thing, as the original was hardly a masterpiece. Horror history is full of great King adaptations, from The Shining, to IT, to Pet Sematary. One adaptation unlikely to ever be nominated for that top echelon though is Children of the Corn, released in 1984, and directed by Fritz Kiersch. While the film proved popular enough to spawn a seemingly never-ending franchise, so did Leprechaun and The Amityville Horror, so that’s hardly a symbol of quality.
There have so far been a whopping ten films based at least somewhat on King’s story Children of the Corn, published as part of the Night Shift collection. Most have little in common with each other, outside of killer corn-worshiping kids, and their god He Who Walks Behind the Rows. Some are fairly good, some are decent, but most of the Children of the Corn entries are outright terrible, as well as intensely boring.
In other words, there’s no real place for the Children of the Corn franchise to go but up, so when news broke recently that a Children of the Corn remake had been secretly shooting in Australia, there wasn’t much outrage from horror diehards. Even the 1984 original, easily the best regarded of the series, has many areas that ache for improvement.
How Children of the Corn’s Remake Can improve On the Original
There are two ways in which the 1984 Children of the Corn really did excel. The first is casting, as lead protagonists Peter Horton and Linda Hamilton, and corn cult leader Isaac (John Franklin) and his henchman Malachai (Courtney Gains), all do quite well in their roles. The score by Jonathan Elias is also really good, and downright haunting at times. Unfortunately, that’s about where the positive notes end. Children of the Corn‘s biggest issue was with a shoestring budget, which really shows, and colors much of the film’s problems.
Children of the Corn 1984 looks extremely cheap, from its costumes to its sets and locations, to its overall production design. Everything is very sparsely detailed, and never really looks believable. The lighting is also really flat, leading to kind of a TV movie look at times. The special effects are also very iffy, and hit their worst point with the film’s absolutely awful attempt to visualize He Who Walks Behind the Rows, which basically just looks like a sky blob. Outside of budget, the adaptation could also have benefited by sticking closer to King’s text, which puts the main characters at odds with each other, and also has a lot darker, and sharper of an edge to it.
These are all areas that the new Children of the Corn remake should very easily be able to improve on, as long as the budget isn’t tiny, and modern special effects techniques are put to good use. Hopefully it does a better job of that then the already pretty obscure previous remake of Children of the Corn, which debuted as a Syfy original movie in 2009. It made some improvements on the 1984 movie, and stuck closer to King’s prose, but was still a Syfy original movie, with stiff acting and and an unwillingness to get too creative.
