Review: Fritz Kiersch’s Children of the Corn Gets 4K Ultra HD Arrow Edition

He Who Walks Behind the Rows is sure to be appeased by the cornucopia of bonus materials on Arrow’s 4K Blu-ray.

Children of the CornFreely adapted from a Stephen King short story, Children of the Corn combines aspects of two redoubtable horror subgenres—crazed cult activity and creepy killer kids—into a rather half-baked morality play about the malefic influence of religious fundamentalism. The film takes place in Gatlin, Nebraska, a dustbowl town where all the grownups have been violently purged by the younger generation several years earlier at the behest of child preacher Isaac (John Franklin), the sole conduit for the edicts of a godlike being known as He Who Walks Behind the Rows. Into their midst wander bickering a couple, Burt (Peter Horton) and Vicky (Linda Hamilton), on their way to job prospects on the West Coast.

The initial blood sacrifice of the adults seems to have been linked to an ongoing corn drought (or so suggests a conveniently placed church marquee glimpsed in the opening flashback), linking up with a wide array of mythological and folkloric motifs chronicled by James Frazer in his landmark study The Golden Bough. Not that the film does much of anything with such potent material, contenting itself with Isaac’s grandiloquent preachifying and randomly excerpted biblical verses scrawled graffiti-style all over town. We do learn that Isaac’s prohibitions include games of chance and playing music, ironically suggesting there’s a sort of kindred aesthetic spirit between Isaac and the town elders in Footloose.

According to an interview on this Arrow Video edition, screenwriter George Goldsmith intended his screenplay as an allegory for the Iranian Revolution, in which hardline religious pundits overthrew a hitherto secular society, taking a number of Americans hostage in the process. However lightweight the parallels may appear in hindsight, the basic scenario can equally apply to any society where religion and politics combine to oppress the populace, a process that was certainly at work in this country during the 1980s with the rise of the religious right. Mining to the bedrock message of the film, Goldsmith’s script opposes Isaac’s repressive and violent credo with Burt’s vision of belief based on “love and compassion.”

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Director Franz Kiersch approaches the slasher material with a certain classicism, suggesting via elliptical editing far more than he actually shows. Throughout the film, Kiersch and DP João Fernandes exhibit a penchant for clever shot compositions and subtle camera movements, imbuing the film with some visual verve and several well-mounted suspense set pieces. The same cannot be said, however, for the disappointingly lackluster finale, which is hampered above all by budgetary limitations, resulting in some decidedly cheapjack special effects. But it also suffers from some genre-standard fails: inconsistent character motivation, hysterical running about, and (always the worst) inopportune falling down.

Though Burt and Vicky are the ostensible heroes and focus for audience identification, the story is framed by voiceover narration from young Job (Robby Kiger), a moppet on the outs with Isaac and his brutal enforcer Malachi (Courtney Gains) because he wasn’t present for their new god’s initial revelation in the cornfields. Significantly, Job takes on some serious agency during the finale, while Burt is busy tripping over his own feet. Job also gets some supposedly adorable comical retorts, meaning that the film likewise suffers from what I have come to call Precious Kid Syndrome (PKD). So, Children of the Corn is ultimately something of a mixed bag: smartly put together, suitably creepy in most of the right places, albeit plagued with some serious missteps and miscalculations in its last act.

Image/Sound

Arrow’s 4K HDR presentation of Children of the Corn comes from a scan of the original camera negative, yet the results leave something to be desired. The 2160p transfer lacks the cleanness and vibrancy of the distributor’s earlier 4K releases like Flash Gordon and Tremors: Colors appear a bit drab at times, clarity and depth vary, and grain levels can get pretty chunky. On the audio front, there’s an option between the reasonably immersive Master Audio surround and a more front-and-center LPCM stereo track. Both provide clean dialogue, but the surround mix provides a much better grounding for Jonathan Elias’s haunting, child chorus-heavy score.

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Extras

Arrow makes up for its somewhat underwhelming AV presentation with a veritable cornucopia of extras. There are two complementary commentary tracks, one with cast and crew (director Fritz Kiersch, producer Terrence Kirby, and actors John Franklin and Courtney Gains), and the other with horror journalist Justin Beahm and Children of the Corn historian John Sullivan. The first is packed with anecdotes about the production, while the second goes at length into the filming locations, the Stephen King source material, and how the film stacks up against the horror industry at the time. A lot of the first track is recapitulated in the “Harvesting Horror” featurette, a nearly 40-minute making-of doc that also includes some talking-head contributions from Iowa locals who witnessed or participated in the film shoot.

Elsewhere, both archival and more recent interviews represent various members of the cast and crew who weren’t on the commentary track. Of the two leads, only Linda Hamilton turns up here, talking about her early career, enjoying the physicality of her roles, and blaming her hair and clothing styles on the ’80s aesthetic. Particularly informative are the interviews with writer George Goldsmith, production designer Craig Stearns, and Elias. Sullivan returns to lead a guided video tour of filming locations across three small Iowa towns that were stitched together to represent Gatlin. Last but certainly not least on the menu is “Disciples of the Crow,” a short film adaptation of the King short story that came out a year before Children of the Corn. It’s expertly put together and wonderfully atmospheric.

Overall

He Who Walks Behind the Rows is sure to be appeased by the cornucopia of bonus materials on Arrow’s 4K Blu-ray, though the transfer itself leaves something to be desired.

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Score: 
 Cast: Peter Horton, Linda Hamilton, R.G. Armstrong, John Franklin, Courtney Gains, Robby Kiger, Anne Marie McEvoy, Julie Maddalena, Jonas Marlow, John Philbin, Dan Snook, David Cowen, Suzy Southam, D.G. Johnson  Director: Fritz Kiersch  Screenwriter: George Goldsmith  Distributor: Arrow Video  Running Time: 92 min  Rating: R  Year: 1984  Release Date: September 28, 2021  Buy: Video

Budd Wilkins

Budd Wilkins's writing has appeared in Film Journal International and Video Watchdog. He is a member of the Online Film Critics Society.

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