Old Ways, New Religion
This week, killer children, killer children's TV, and a demon. Some spoilers below.
From the Grave.
Three ideas from horror cinema's past.
◆ Children of the Corn, dir. Fritz Kiersch, 1984.
Folk horror? For its central couple, Children of the Corn is pure folk horror. Outsiders who find themselves in Gatlin on a road trip through Nebraska, Burt (Peter Horton) and Vicky (Linda Hamilton) encounter a violent local religion, a belief system emanating from the region’s unique way of life and its landscape—from its cornfield. It’s part of the same cultural space, for Burt and Vicky, of the raving country preacher they hear on the radio. They encounter an entity too—He Who Walks Behind The Rows—unique to Gatlin. These are rural, Nebraska horrors. Yet the horror in Gatlin has a different tenor in the flashback we get to three years prior, when the children of the town kill all of the adults. For the adults set upon at the local diner, this isn’t folk horror. It’s a brand new kind of horror. It’s a revolt, a sharp discontinuity with their way of life. This distinction between the experiences of the roadtrippers and the townsfolk underlines the relevance of perspective to folk horror—much depends on who you are, what you know, and where you’re from.
Whose old ways? Burt is constantly calming Vicky down, managing her emotions, and telling her what to do. He’s also constantly taking charge, even though his decisions tend to be bad ones. Vicky, on the other hand, often has the right idea. The foundation of misogyny in their relationship is largely naturalized in the film—this simply isn’t a movie with the savviness to have a smart perspective on the couple’s dynamic. And yet, it comes across—more distinctly now than in the 1980s—as a politically multi-dimensional work of cinema. It’s a film about rural religion, about strange goings on in forgotten pockets of the country—but its city-slicker roadtrippers are, in their own way, adherents of their own “old ways,” living in a world structured by misogyny.