Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Like a virus that keeps coming back but growing weaker each time, “Children of the Corn” is now a horror movie that lacks the strength to infect you with even a speck of fear.
The original strain of the virus was Stephen King’s short story — published in 1977, at the heart of his shivery heyday. The tale of a group of Nebraska farm-town children who worship a demon that lives in the local cornfields, it was like a slasher version of “Lord of the Flies,” with a touch of the creepiness of “The Wicker Man.” The kids killed the adults around them, but the scariest thing about them is that they’d become a cult.
The cornfield demon, known as He Who Walks Behind the Rows, was less a monster than a force, one that spoke to gathering forces in our society — impulses of religious zealotry and intolerance that were starting to take shape by the late ’70s.
The new “Children of the Corn” is the 11th film to have been sprung from King’s story. The most famous is the 1984 big-screen version, though there were eight sequels (what, you didn’t know about “Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest”? “Children of the Corn 666: Isaac’s Return”?), and the iconography has been referenced by everything from “South Park” to Eminem to Kendrick Lamar to “Wreck-It Ralph.” The new version is technically a prequel, though all that really means is that the heart of King’s story has now been ripped out and tossed aside.
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