For decades, the Children of the Corn franchise has bounded through its ups, its downs, and some surprising guest stars—but if there’s one thing you can often rely on, it’s an excellent performance from a kid on the edge.
The latest remake—stranded in limbo for the past couple years after filming in Australia in 2020 during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic—delivers on that promise with a wink and a sunflower ring. The 14-year-old Canadian actress Kate Moyer is a delight as she gleefully mows down every adult in sight. Unfortunately, she and co-star Elena Kampouris (My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2) are two of the few sweet kernels in a strained franchise extension that’s otherwise kind of moldy.
The first Children of the Corn adaptation, which debuted in 1984, introduced viewers to the small corn-farming town of Gatlin, Nebraska—where a bunch of kids had recently decided to murder all of their elders. Since then, Stephen King’s short story has stretched into an 11-film franchise with such illustrious guest stars as Naomi Watts, Eva Mendes, and David Carradine. (Don’t remember them? You should have stuck around for installments 4 and 5!)
This new film does not connect to any of that prior lore. Instead, we get a convoluted origin story for our new problem child, whose vengeance is somehow even sillier than all of those who came before her.
Children of the Corn (2023) opens on a baffling mass murder in a children’s home, where farmers gassed 15 orphaned children to death in order to catch one teen murderer. (Why? We never find out.) Four days after the massacre, the 12-year-old Eden—who escaped the killing and ran into the corn—emerges from the rows visibly changed. She’s obsessed with the Red Queen from Alice in Wonderland now (for some reason), and she has the Kool Aid wig to back it up. Things only get stranger from there.
Moyer, who made her screen debut in 2017’s It, sells the hell out of her role. Her sighs telegraph a specific kind of tween exasperation, and she’s got performative boredom on lock. As Eden dances on old cars in her signature cowboy boots, it almost feels like watching the dark twin of a Taylor Swift video. It doesn’t hurt that the movie around her is almost resolute in its goofiness—even (or perhaps especially) as it grasps at corn stalks for resonance.
As far as killer-kid origin stories go, surviving a massacre of one’s fellow orphans is pretty solid. Throw in some careless use of pesticides by the grown-ups, which ravages the corn that saved Eden’s life with fungus, and she and most of her fellow kiddos are ready to kill everyone over 18 in town. Well, almost everyone.
While the original screen adaptation of Stephen King’s short story wisely does not show us what it looked like when its child antagonists killed all the adults in town, this one goes all-in on the idea. And then there’s the film’s gesture at a message: As we learn early on, the adults have carelessly killed their crops with chemicals with no concerns about the consequences. One might think we’re in for some thin but prescient climate commentary, but nope! Instead, we get an exquisitely bizarre scene in which Eden has her child henchmen paint the rotting corn roots with blood. Extracurriculars are important!
Laying witness to all this is the horrified Boleyn Williams, who quickly becomes the one girl left in town who hasn’t fallen behind Eden and our supernatural villain, He Who Walks Behind the Rows. (In this adaptation, the often unseen supernatural force is actually an embodied monster made of corn stalks.)
Actress Elena Kampouris makes Boleyn’s panic palpable with a tearful resignation that almost makes the proceedings feel believable. Moyer, meanwhile, keeps things campier. Sometimes, this contrast produces a gratifying tension; in other moments, like the film’s bonkers final act, they begin to clash. And at no point do we get any explanation for the name “Boleyn”—perhaps an “off with their heads” reference to call back Eden’s obsession with the Red Queen, whose farcical trials she even re-enacts.
Speaking of clashing—perhaps the biggest sin of this film is its Puritan lack of style. The original Children of the Corn featured some looks we’ll never forget—like Isaac’s ridiculous hat and Malachai’s ironic shaggy hair. (I can practically hear him yelling “Outlander!” now.)
What is this new Children of the Corn giving us, aesthetically? There’s some flair to Eden’s costume design; evil girls and poofy sleeves are always a delightful combination, and that sunflower ring would be blowing up on Etsy if this movie were a viral Netflix hit. Beyond that, however, everything feels a little bland. The visuals are crisp, but too often there is little to see.
As always, there are some genuinely gratifying kills in this new Children of the Corn—including one particularly harrowing eye-related scene that somehow outdoes Pedro Pascal’s brutal Game of Thrones demise. Alas, the truth now is the same as it has been for more than a decade: This franchise peaked with its first two installments, and after Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest, return trips to Gatlin are best scheduled only for the extremely devoted.
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