Movie Review: CHILDREN OF THE CORN (2023)

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: March 3rd, 2023 / 04:17 PM

The Children of CHILDREN OF THE CORN | ©2023 RLJE Films

Rating: R
Stars: Elena Kampouris, Kate Moyer, Callan Mulvey, Bruce Spence, Stephen Hunter, Jayden McGinlay, Joe Klocek
Writer: Kurt Wimmer, based on the short story by Stephen King
Director: Kurt Wimmer
Distributor: RLJE Films
Release Date: March 3, 2023 (theatrical); March 21, 2023 (digital)

Stephen King’s short story “Children of the Corn,” originally published in 1977, has proven itself to be a bonanza for makers of horror movies. The first film adaptation came out in 1984, and since then, there have been at least nine sequels/remakes.

Director/screenwriter Kurt Wimmer brings the current total CHILDREN OF THE CORN movie tally to eleven with his new version.

Wimmer keeps most of King’s story’s core ideas (a creature in the corn, a cult of children), but comes up with his own characters and mythology. The result has an agreeable moral ambiguity that we don’t normally associate with this source material.

Rylstone, Nebraska is a small town that has relied on corn and is now going broke due to bad stewardship. The town’s adults have already proven themselves to be greedy, gullible, and overall wrong-headed in relying on corporate chemicals to grow more crops. Instead, the chemicals have poisoned the ground, and the fields are dying.

And this is before Eden (Kate Moyer), a little girl who resides at the Rylstone Children’s Home, is playing outside the facility’s main building. A teen boy she knows tells her, “Don’t worry, Eden. Nothing ever really dies in the corn.”

Then the boy stabs a man who tries to stop him, goes inside, and kills the other adults. In an act that should bring in the state authorities, but doesn’t, the sheriff’s department uses gas to subdue the attacker, killing him – and the fifteen orphans inside. Eden, the only survivor, is adopted by the town’s creepy pastor (Bruce Spence).

CHILDREN OF THE CORN movie poster | ©2023 RLJE Films

Meanwhile, seventeen-year-old Boleyn Williams (Elena Kampouris) is at odds with her brother Cecil (Jayden McGinlay), who resents that she’ll be leaving for college in Boston. Boleyn is also clashing with their father, Robert (Callan Mulvey), who is also the town’s mayor. Robert is in favor of taking a government subsidy to plow under the cornfields altogether, while Boleyn wants to heal the land.

While this version of CHILDREN OF THE CORN departs from the specifics of King’s original, it does incorporate a lot of his themes about power and mob violence.

The primary antagonist here likewise is giving a surprising sense of righteous grievance. Even when Eden is playing at a trial that could result in the death of another child, the offense is enough for us to feel that some sort of punishment (although not capital) ought to happen. When the children express anger at the adults for literally selling and contaminating their futures, we can’t help but agree.

Eden is also given a dimension of imagination. She may find friends and role models in unusual places, but she’s much more coherent than most characters we see in her position.

Moyer gives Eden a confidence and a resignation that are appropriate to a child who has had to suffer through a lot to survive, and Kampouris is very sympathetic as the well-intentioned Boleyn.

While we don’t see too much of the creature, its design is well in keeping with its origins, especially the Venus flytrap touches. The way Wimmer frames our first views of it, criss-crossing behind the corn stalks, is pleasingly ominous, and we even get a few effective jump scares.

Is this CHILDREN OF THE CORN the best Stephen King adaptation ever? No, but it does what it sets out to do, and gives us more than we might be expecting.

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