I’ve seen Steven King’s ‘Children of the Corn’ several times and I read the book once a long time ago. I have some questions about this book that maybe someone can answer and a few thoughts too.
1)Wouldn’t somebody NOTICE long before the Outsiders got there that there were no cars coming out of/going into the town, or was it really just that far out of the way?
2)Was there something in the town’s watersuppply or the food that caused a mass hypnosis on the kids? Is that why none of them rebelled against Malachi and his goos or the Preacher Kid (whose name I can’t remember right now…Issac?)
3)How on earth did a bunch of kids manage to kill ALL the adults with so little effort? Why didn’t any of the adults fight back?
4)I never quite understood why the kids didn’t also kill the one person who knew their secret, the owner of the Gasohol station with the dog. What use was the Gasohol to them anyway? None of them could drive cars.
5)How on earth did the kids survive for that long without somebody to farm the land and produce some sort of edible food/drinks.Granted…they could’ve lived off canned goods for awhile but it just doesn’t jive with me that they survived more than a year without fresh food.
I understood from the story that the kids were growing corn. The “cult” if you will had been going on for a long time. In the story, the husband finds the church register, indicating that it had been years since all of the parents were killed.
There were hints, IIRC, that something had happened to the corn harvest at one point, and the kids began believing that their parent’s sin was causing it. They killed off all of the adults, and set up their own society.
The story differs a bit from the film. It goes without saying that the story was better. The character of the gasohol man wasn’t in it.
I guess the authorities wrote them off as a religious community with few ties to the outside world, a la Amish
The adults were probably outnumbered, and caught off guard.
I can’t remember exactly, but I think they used the gas for lighting and in machines to help them…
farm the land themselves.
I could be way off. After the third sequel, everything’s kind of a blur. And dammit, another one just came out, and it looks like utter crap. Why can’t someone with an iota of creativity take the reins and make a watchable sequel to what was a genuinely scary film.
Perhaps the authorities DID write them off as a semi-Amish type community, since it seemed they didn’t have a whole lot of ‘modern’ technology but in my mind, the authorities would’ve checked on the townsfolk every once in awhile to make sure no fights had broken out, everybody was ok, that sort of thing. You think they’d have noticed there were no adults around.
And I can’t quite believe that if the authorities did check on them, that the kids just killed them because that would’ve caused even more trouble, more cops swarming about, that sort of thing and the whole cult would’ve been disbanded long before the Outsiders arrived.
That makes sense…kind of. But you’d have thought that even ONE adult (and I’m sure they weren’t all old feebs who couldn’t fight back like Preacher Kid’s father) who would’ve fought back and gone on to tell the kids “Hey,dudes, this is WRONG!”.
The scariest thing about this movie, I thought, was the religious fervor. It’s what I imagine would happen if the Southern Baptists took over. shudder
They could, but farming land manually, without the use of tractors and such (which I assumed they didn’t have and even if they did they’d be too young to drive the suckers) is hard work, much too harsh for kids to be doing anyway.
In the story, the “creature” (for lack of a better word) that lived in the cornfield must have had some sort of deal to take care of the crop with the kids. The story notes that the corn was in unnaturally even rows, without even a single weed.
I caught the implication that, through human sacrifice, they guaranteed a bountiful harvest.
Been a while since I’ve seen the movie, and even longer since I’ve read the book, but I think Lissa has it. “He who walks behind the rows” was an actual entity and not just a bogeyman to scare people into conforming. Apparently, he also took care of the kids providing they offered up sacrifices as necessary.
It’s great. All the kids cry child abuse, so all the parents leave. There’s an act break, and then the next part opens up with a young couple driving into town. The town’s in bad shape, there are sacrifices of other children, and we eventually learn that the whole town has gone to hell in just 3 days.
Ah, here it is. Episode 64, The Wacky Molestation Adventure.
Well, the summary says it’s more like Logan’s Run or Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, but it’s more like what Children of the Corn would be like if I ever bother to actually watch it.
Ok…but assuming that the boys aren’t getting the girls pregnant and producing more children to sacrafice to “he who walks behind the Rows”…wouldn’t the supply of sacraficiable children soon run out?
They are having children. The husband finds a book in the church which records the birth of the first baby “Eve” some years ago.
The story continues to a point after the couple is killed. In the final scene, the children gather to witness another sacrifice. It seems that once they reach a certain age, (IIRC, it was 19) they must walk into the corn and are never seen again. (The little boy in the beginning was actually murdered for trying to run away. The sacrifices just walk into the corn and are killed by the monster.) The narration at this part focuses on a young girl, who is pregnant with the child of the one who walks into the corn. It never says that he his her husband, merely that he is the father of her child. The story ends with the spiritual leader of the group claiming that God has told him in a vision that the age limit must be lowered.
Fights, shmights. You’d have thought somebody would notice that nobody around there was paying their taxes. Now there’s an idea for a really scary movie… :eek:
Ah…okie. Now I sorta understand. It’s been a really long time since I read the book and I recently saw the movie, which brought all these questions up. I’ll go to the library, check out the book and re-read it.