Year – 1984 Decade – 1980s Cinematographer – João Fernandes Director – Fritz Kiersch Distributor – New World Pictures Genre – Horror Keywords – 1980s horror; Stephen King adaptations Shooting […]
Year – 1984
Decade – 1980s
Cinematographer – João Fernandes
Director – Fritz Kiersch
Distributor – New World Pictures
Genre – Horror
Keywords – 1980s horror; Stephen King adaptations
Shooting Location – Iowa (including Hornick, Whiting and Sioux City)
Aspect Ratio – 1.85
Camera – Arriflex 35 BL III
Format – 35mm with spherical lenses
The Movie
Driving across the country to start his residency, a young doctor (Peter Horton) and his girlfriend (Linda Hamilton) become trapped in a rural Nebraska town where the religious fanatic children have killed off the adults in service of a malevolent entity they’ve christened He Who Walks Behind the Rows. Based on Stephen King’s short story, originally published in the March 1977 issue of Penthouse and later included in King’s collection Night Shift. Though set in Nebraska, the movie was shot over four weeks in a series of small towns in Iowa
This one holds a special place for me as one of the first horror films I ever saw. I caught the movie on HBO in a motel (knowing my dad, probably a Knight’s Inn) during a family vacation in the mid-1980s. We didn’t have cable or a VCR yet and no one was taking 8-year-old me to see murderous kids wielding farming implements in the theater, so my only chance to catch something like Children of the Corn was at a Knight’s Inn on the way to Florida.
Revisiting Children of the Corn now, I’m surprised by the level of craft. The film – one of the first produced by New World Pictures after Roger Corman sold the company – doesn’t seem to be particularly well thought of and its reputation hasn’t been helped by the 10 sequels/remakes it spawned (a robust lineage for a short story that clocks in at 29 pages in my copy of Night Shift). But it’s a well-made genre exercise for the time, with the inherently silly premise and the subpar special effects of the finale offset by the unsettling choral score from Jonathan Elias and the compositions of cinematographer João Fernandes. The Brazilian DP (here credited as Raoul Lomas) got his start shooting the touchstones of the “porno chic” era of the 1970s (including Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones) before moving on to lens slasher classics The Prowler and Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter and roughly a dozen Chuck Norris flicks.
Scene Breakdowns
Opening Credits
Illustrator Judeanne Winter Wiley on creating the drawings for the character of Sarah, which were used in the credits…
“I did some drawing with my left hand to make it appear as if someone younger created them…Sarah’s drawings were my first job as an illustrator. I thought it was ironic that after years of art school, my first job was to draw like I did as a child.”
A piece of business from the opening revolt where the kids take over the town. Despite the R rating, most of the film’s grislier moments are merely implied and occur off-camera, such as this gentleman’s hand going into the meat cutter.
Vicky (Linda Hamilton) and Burt (Peter Horton) accidentally run down a kid in the road.
Nightmare sequence where Hamilton imagines the boy leaping up and grabbing at her.
Gas station attendant R.G. Armstrong – who shot his entire role in just one day – grapples with the corn kids’ enforcer Malachai, played by Courtney Gains.
Filmmaker Quotes
Screenwriter George Goldsmith on how he came to write the script, from Francesco Borseti’s book It Came From the 80s!…
“Children of the Corn was originally optioned by Hal Roach Studios, a small independent. Stephen King had written a script based on his own short story by the same name [1977]. They could not work with the script and a friend of mine, a story editor in town, recommended me for the rewrite, so I went over to meet with the Hal Roach executive after I read the script.
The first 35 pages had Burt [Peter Horton] and Vicky [Linda Hamilton], the protagonists, driving in a car arguing as they drove through these endless cornfields and back country roads. In my view it was not cinematic at all; interesting dialogue, but sort of claustrophobic and intense and angry. Burt and Vicky’s marriage was not a happy one, but of course that was King setting the stage with tension, claustrophobia, a remote setting, all good elements for a horror story, but to an audience, 35 minutes of this was not going to fly, nor was the very narrative style King had employed throughout. So I came up with an idea to tell the story visually through the eyes and ears of these two little pack rats, Job [Robby Kiger] and Sarah [Anne Marie McEvoy]. They were a completely new invention but to me it worked and gave me an opportunity to visually and cinematically tell King’s story.
Stephen felt otherwise, and the story editor at Hal Roach was on the fence. He liked my ideas but Stephen King was Stephen King, and so we had a conference call, the three of us, which Stephen opened up by informing me I did not understand horror and I countered that he did not understand cinema: horror and fiction are internalized, just like his script. Cinema is external: visual, auditory, a more sensory experience. In the end I prevailed. Hal Roach went with my script and sold it to New World Pictures, which kept my version and kept me on the project all the way through editing.”
Isaac actor John Franklin on his unique haircut…
“I had just done a commercial for the Star Trek Atari (game) and I was a Vulcan. So, they did the fake ears and they did the haircut. And when I landed in Sioux City the next day (after shooting that commercial) to start Children of the Corn, they looked at it and went, ‘It kind of works. It’s weird and creepy. Keep it.'”
Director Fritz Kiersch on creating the effect of He Who Walks Behind the Rows’ subterranean movements…
“I talked with our special effects man and described what I wanted to have happen. And we decided, with the resources we had in Iowa – which basically was a tractor, some aircraft cable, and a ditch digger – that we would build a ditch and build a wooden track in that ditch and take a wheelbarrow, turn it upside down, run it on this track pulled by the aircraft cable, which was pulled by the tractor. Over the top of the ditch would be a canvas on top of which would be some vermiculite and loose soil and as the tractor moved it would pull the wheelbarrow on the track, which would push the canvas up. So for about $100, we made this monster.”
In keeping with that note of thriftiness, here’s Kiersch on using borrowed footage to create additional budget-friendly monster shots…
“A friend of mine who was a cinematographer in television commercials had been making a series of tests for a motorcycle company injecting ink into a liquid and photographing these cloud-like events. I said, ‘What are you going to do with those? Those are cool?’ So, he gave me the negative, I turned it upside down, gave it a color, put it in the sky and that’s what the monster is.”
Actress Linda Hamilton on the film’s dwindling effects budget…
“It being a New World production, because of budget problems they did sort of keep taking away all the special effects. (laughs) I was like, ‘Wait, wait, doesn’t the corn turn black when we go through here?’ And they were like, ‘Oh, no, no, no. We can’t afford that.’ They kept reducing the things that I thought were really exceptional about the script, which were also the things that were exceptionally difficult and exceptionally expensive.”
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