Children of the Corn (R)
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This 1984 film is based on a 1977 short story by Stephen King. I didn't see it until 2024, and I think I might have had a vague idea that it was a TV movie for some reason, but if I did, I was wrong. It's kind of a slasher film, with just a tiny bit of supernatural, but mostly I think of it as folk horror.

It starts with a scene set "three years ago" (so presumably 1981), in which the children of Gatlin, Nebraska kill all the adults in town, under the direction of a young boy named Isaac, who we later learn received instructions from a supernatural entity called He Who Walks Behind the Rows (the rows being a corn field). We don't actually see this entity until near the end of the film, and it's not a particularly impressive special effect.

In the present, a boy named Joseph plans to run away from Gatlin, but ends up being killed by Isaac's chief enforcer, Malachai (Courtney Gains, whom I vaguely knew from other things in the 1980s). At the same time, a couple named Burt and Vicky (Linda Hamilton) are driving through Nebraska on their way to... somewhere else. (I don't remember their destination being mentioned in the movie, but Wikipedia says Seattle. Anyway, it's not important.) While they're looking at a map, Joseph suddenly appears in the road, and they hit him. (I thought it looked like they hit a scarecrow or something, which I guess is just an example of the poor effects in the film.) Burt discovers that the boy's throat had been cut before they hit him, so he puts the body in the trunk and intends to report the murder to the authorities. They stop at a gas station or something, hoping to use the phone. They meet an old mechanic who says he doesn't have a phone, but advises them to avoid Gatlin, which is a few miles away. They try to go to the next town instead, but the road just leads them to Gatlin, anyway.

At first, the town seems deserted, but eventually Burt and Vicky meet a young girl named Sarah. She and her brother, Job, are the only two children in town who aren't part of Isaac's cult, and Malachai would like to kill them, but Isaac forbids it, at least partly because Sarah has visions of the future that she draws. And... eventually Malachai and the other kids try to kill Vicky and Burt, but Job helps them. A bunch of other stuff happens that I don't want to spoil.

The movie doesn't have much of an ending. And I never got a good sense of why all these children accepted Isaac as their leader. Did they actually meet He Who Walks Behind the Rows before killing all the adults? I don't know, but I tend to doubt it. Why were they willing to kill everyone? I don't know. Nothing in the movie makes much sense, except maybe one plot twist that I predicted from the start. And I don't know what else to say. I just found the whole thing rather disappointing.

The movie spawned a number of sequels, which I have no interest in seeing. There was also a TV movie remake in 2009, which I feel ambivalent about whether I'd care to see it or not. Probably not. And there was a reboot in 2023, which I would kind of like to see, just to find out if it's any better than the original.