That The Ground May Be Fertile

Children of the Corn, cults, and America's ghost towns

Good afternoon!

If you’re new here, this is The Barrens, Kindling’s Stephen King book club. Currently we are making our way through King’s first short story collection, Nightshift. Today’s post covers the famous “Children of the Corn.” If you’d like to join in, grab a copy and read “The Last Rung on the Ladder” for next week!

Spring is finally edging in as a possibility after an especially cold, snowy winter. The icy path I walk everyday with my dogs is giving way to slush, and the smell of wet earth and pine fills each afternoon. Things will be growing soon in that fertile ground. Today I thought of our protagonist, Burt, as he drove through the endless cornfields of Nebraska, the smell of fertilizer permeating the summer air.

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America’s Corn Fields

If you’ve ever driven through middle America, you’ll know that the drive is unremarkable. Nebraska and Kansas are particularly painful jaunts, known for their hundreds of miles of nothing, aside from the occasional gas station and roadside town. Back before cell phones, the drive on country highway could put you in a predicament.

What would happen if you broke down and had to walk sixty miles to the nearest gas station? Even worse, what if you were found by someone with less than good intentions? Is it any wonder then that King has found such success in a short story like “Children of the Corn?” Corn fields are, after all, isolated places. The stalks grow anywhere from 8 to 12 feet, and are so uniform that if a person wanders in, they can easily get lost.

Cornfields are popular contemporary horror settings, but will it surprise you to know that this very story is the genesis of that trope? There are, of course, other stories that center on hidden horrors in rural settings, but none that feature the cornfield itself. Until King.

Published in 1977 in Penthouse, “Children of the Corn” has become a staple among horror films.

There have been at least eleven films and TV series created based off of this single short story. I have to ask myself, why? The story is terrifying, combining religious themes, murderous children, isolation, and a supernatural monster who stalks the cornfields at night, hungry for blood.

But the actual short story is more complex than the films and TV made from it. The children are not all evil. Instead, they seem caught up in an impossible deal with the devil, required to worship some supernatural monster that feeds on the blood of adults. The children themselves will become victim to it when they turn 19. As with many horror stories, there is always the question, one that can frustrate readers and watchers: if they’re scared, why don’t they just leave?

Of course, we can ask ourselves that about the real life cults who mentally imprison their communities, or the abusers who seem to have the ability to strip a person of their own critical thinking and enslave them to a life of fearful subservience. The story is effective then because it is complex, the horror built in layers. Fear of isolation, fear of dark religious control, fear of the demonic, fear of evil.

And of course there’s a thinly veiled question that society was asking in the 70’s: where have we gone wrong with our children?

Other writers and filmmakers explored this idea. Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, The Omen. It was a time of dark awakening in America, when people were questioning authority systems and pushing back against religious institutions. High crime haunted America’s big cities, economic turmoil and fear took hold of the populace, and media covered a seemingly endless string of national and international vice.

It’s no wonder that we see some combination of all these themes, the couple on the verge of divorce, a little town where the children have sacrificed their parents to a devil, the murder of innocent people for some supernatural being’s gain.

Quick question: does anyone else think of this episode of The Twilight Zone when they think of the cornfield?

“You’re a bad man! You’re a very bad man!”

“Wish him into the cornfield Anthony.”

I digress, but watch this clip here for some creepy child goodness.

Back to the story.

The Road Trip to Hell

Burt and Vicky are a husband and wife on the verge of divorce. Their long drive through Nebraska is a last ditch effort to try and save their marriage. Some of it has gone well, breathed hope into the cobwebbed resentments that have led their relationship to an impasse, but ever since they got off the turnpike, things have been bad.

Burt turned the radio on too loud and didn’t turn it down because they were on the verge of another argument and he didn’t want it to happen. He was desperate for it not to happen.

Vicky said something.

“What?” he shouted.

“Turn it down! Do you want to break my eardrums?”

He bit down hard on what might have come through his mouth and turned it down.

The couple’s bickering is cut short when Burt, distracted by Vicky’s insults, runs over something in the middle of the road.

“A dog,” he said. “Tell me it was a dog, Vicky.”

But it was not a dog. It was a little boy, who ran from the corn fields and disappeared under the car. And just like that, Burt is facing a manslaughter charge. What appears to be a pile of rags in the rearview is actually a boy, around 12 or 13 years old. Burt pulls his car over.

He was halfway between the car and where she stood and something caught his eye on the left, a gaudy splash of red paint amid all the green, as bright as barn paint.

He stopped, looking directly into the corn. He found himself thinking (anything to untrack from those rags that were not rags) that it must have been a fantastically good growing season for corn. It grew close together, almost ready to bear. You could plunge into those neat, shaded rows and spend a day trying to find your way out again. But the neatness was broken here. Several tall cornstalks had been broken and leaned askew. And what was that further back in the shadows.

On investigating the scene, Burt finds a suitcase, blood on the ground, and broken stalks of corn. Vicky is sobbing over the body, screaming and then laughing into the sky. The suitcase is tied with rope, blood soaked into the fiber. When Burt turns the body over, he sees that his throat had been cut.

There aren’t any cell phones

The nearest town, Gatlin, is twenty miles away. Burt picks the boy up, and puts his body in the trunk. Vicky is horrified, but Burt can’t shake the feeling that whoever cut this boy’s throat and threw him stumbling into the road might still be watching them. They get in the car and he asks Vicky to open the suitcase as he turns on the radio.

The only station that comes through is a radio preacher.

“HOLY JESUS!” the evangelist shouted, and now the words came in a powerful, pumping cadence, almost as compelling as a driving rock-and-roll beat: “When they gonna know that way is death? When they gonna know that the wages of the world are paid on the other side…The Lord has said there’s many mansions in His house. But there’s no room for the fornicator. No room for the coveter. No room for the defiler of the corn.”

Vicky snaps it off, and we learn that she has left the fire and brimstone religious beliefs of her childhood with no intent to return. There isn’t much in the suitcase. Various pieces of clothing, a string tie with Hopalong Cassidy on it, and a corn husk cross.

“Don’t you think he sounded kind of young? That preacher?”

Burt has no idea how strange the young preacher is, or how wrong the decision to find a constable in the little town of Gatlin will turn out to be.

Signs of life start to appear as they drive.

But there isn’t anyone in the little barns along the highway. The gas station is deserted, so Burt decides to search for some town center.

YOU ARE NOW ENTERING GATLIN, NICEST LITTLE TOWN IN NEBRASKA—OR ANYWHERE ELSE! POP. 5431

Where exactly is that population? The stoplight doesn’t work. There isn’t a single flicker of lights or the noise of a small downtown. Everything is silent. Vicky desperately wants to turn around, sensing that they are alone in the town, and more than that, that something isn’t right. Burt refuses to listen to her, instead pulling up to a little restaurant with the open sign in the window.

“Do you hear it?” she asked as he joined her.

“Hear what?”

“The nothing. No cars. No people. No tractors. Nothing.”

And then, from a block over, they heard the high and joyous laughter of children.”

The place is dusty. The prices are cents on the dollar. The calendar on the wall is flipped to 1964, twelve years earlier. The beer taps have been pulled off and scattered across the counter. Not a soul has been in this place for years.

They head back to the car and drive to the Municipal Center, where Burt is convinced he will find someone to turn the body of the child in his trunk over to, when he sees an idyllic white church to his left. The place looks manicured, well kept. He pulls over turns off the car.

Vicky is hysterical. She doesn’t want to go into the church, the images of her unhappy upbringing no doubt flashing in her mind. She gives Burt an ultimatum. If he isn’t out in five minutes, she’ll drive away and leave him there. After all, she has a spare set of keys in her purse.

Burt remedies that, determined not to let her run his life, and walks into the church.

Bread crumbs leading nowhere good.

Suspense thrives on the little clues that set off internal alarm bells for the character and the reader as we witness them experiencing the uncanny. Burt finds large wooden letters in a corner of the vestibule, the only thing in the place that isn’t dusted and tidy. GRACE BAPTIST CHURCH, he eventually makes out.

Why did they take these down? Because they aren’t baptist anymore. So what are they?

For some reason the question caused a trickle of fear…

A portrait of Christ is behind the pulpit, painted in a mural. Sinners burn in a lake of fire, and Christ grins out, his hair green, a mass of summer corn. The pipe organ has been stuffed with corn cobs, the keys ripped off and a sign on a plaque reads MAKE NO MUSIC EXCEPT WITH HUMAN TONGUE SAITH THE LORD GOD.

**This scene and the sense of profane dread in what should be a sacred space reminds me of King’s first story in this collection, “Jerusalem’s Lot.” Do you remember the ghastly discovery that Charles and Calvin make in that old, empty town? The following description is taken from the article I wrote on that story, “Rats in the Walls.”

They reach the church last, its steeple like the one depicted on the map. When they open the doors, the smell of death overwhelms them. In the vestibule is a painting, an obscene take of the madonna and her child, demonic creatures crawling in the background.

On entering the church, they find a golden cross, hung upside down in the “symbol of Satan’s Mass.” When they reach the pulpit, they find a large book open, covered in a mix of ancient runes and Latin. The title of the book, De Vermis Mysteriis, in English, The Mysteries of the Worm. When Charles touches it, the world before him trembles, the church itself shakes.

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Nope, nope, nope!

This is where you turn and run Burt, and does he? No. He explores further, pulled in by the dark mysteries of the church. A bible, parts cut to pieces, is spread on the lectern. A book recording the deaths of the townspeople sits on a shelf. The cover stamped with THUS LET THE INIQUITOUS BE CUT DOWN SO THAT THE GROUND MAY BE FERTILE AGAIN SAITH THE LORD GOD OF HOSTS.

The names inscribed in a child’s handwriting show that the adults of the town all died in 1964, the deaths after all on a person’s 19th birthday.

Perhaps a religious mania had swept them. Alone, all alone, cut off from the outside world by hundreds of square miles of the rustling secret corn. Alone under seventy million acres of blue sky. Alone under the watchful eye of God, now a strange green God, a God of corn, grown old and strange and hungry. He Who Walks Behind the Rows.

The realization comes to him, an almost telepathic knowing. The kids murdered their parents. Shot them, poisoned them, hung them. All for the corn. Maybe driven by bad crops blamed on sin. Whatever the reason, he knows he has to run.

But of course it’s too late.

By the time he gets outside, Vicky has her hand on the horn. From all sides are children, dressed in long brown wool dresses and black pants, bonnets and flat brimmed hats on their heads. They carry farming tools and knives. They go to the car, beat in the windows, stab the tires, and little hands reach in to carry Vicky away.

Burt runs back on the highway, darting into the only place he can hide: the cornfield. Running through the rows of corn, feeling more alive than he has since he was a child, he ducks and darts to avoid being seen by the children, falling in deeper and deeper, until their voices are far away.

He stays there until the sun starts to dip, and he makes his way to a large circle of earth, a clearing he has been pulled to all along.

It was time to go down to the clearing in the corn and see what was there—hadn’t that been the plan all along? All the time he had thought he was cutting back to the highway, hadn’t he been being led to this place?

There he finds Vicky, mounted on a crossbar, her eye sockets stuffed with corn silk, her mouth stuffed with cornhusks. A skeleton in the same position sits beside her, a police chief hat on his head. The corn closes in around the clearing, and Burt hears something large walking towards him. Then he sees it. Something large with terrible red eyes the size of footballs…He Who Walks Behind the Rows.

The story ends with the children of the corn, staring at the crucified bodies of Vicky and Burt.

A young boy, only 9, prophesies, saying he had a dream that the Lord was not pleased with the sacrifice. Burts escape meant the demon god had to do the killing himself. And hadn’t he given them a place of killing?

The children wail, knowing another sacrifice must be made.

“So now is the Age of Favor lowered from nineteen plantings and harvestings to eighteen…”

The two eighteen year olds look at one another, the eyes of the others watching to see what will be decided. Malachi, the one who hunted Japheth and cut his throat, and threw him out of the cornfield volunteers, walking into the corn towards the clearing.

Ruth, a young girl pregnant with his child cries as he leaves, her hatred for the corn growing, but not replacing her fear of the demon god that walked there at night.

Out there in the night, something walked, and it saw everything…even the secrets kept in human hearts.

Dusk deepened into night. Around Gatlin the corn rustled and whispered secretly. It was well pleased.

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So it isn’t just a cult of evil children

These kids are serving some kind of supernatural being who requires human sacrifice to keep the crops growing, He Who Walks Behind the Rows. They themselves are victim to its wishes, following the instructions of the seer, first David and then Isaac, after David gave himself to the corn a year before.

They likely hate the being that rules over them, but their fear drives them to worship by any means necessary. Of course the question is why they don’t leave, but as stated above, that reality is witnessed even absent any supernatural beast stalking the night and demanding sacrifice. Is it really that unrealistic to imagine a dark cult could control its people so effectively that they would never dare to wander up the highway road, searching for a better life?

I think not. It may be the most realistic part of this entire story.

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This one has really stuck with me, and on finishing it, I’m not surprised by the place it has taken in the horror genre. King has packed so many layers of terrifying possibility, it only makes sense that others would mimic, expand, and run with the ideas here. Did you like it?

How did you feel about the conclusion, where we find that the children are not just monsters bent on murder, but victims to a vicious corn God who demands sacrifice? Each of them know what their fate will be, and the consequences for not following through? Death.

I couldn’t help but think of three real life horrors while reading this: child soldiers, cult control, and the reality that corn fields are prime places for dumping bodies. A simple google search revealed dozens of recent cases. So if you’re tempted to jump on those old country roads on your next road trip, maybe think twice. Stick to the places where the people are.

In the meantime, Happy Reading.