Why The Corn Kids Needed The Original Dark Short Story Ending
1984’s The Corn Kids was a financially successful Stephen King adaptation, but the film needed the short story’s original abrupt ending.
the Stephen King short story Corn Children has a brutal original ending that the film adaptation should have retained. Stephen King may be a horror icon, but not all of his stories flow smoothly from page to page. Whether it’s changing the vampiric villains of Salem Bundle as mute bloodsuckers or reimagining the guise of Pennywise the Dancing Clown, the filmmakers tasked with bringing King’s literary nightmares to life have always taken creative liberties with the author’s work.
In some cases, these changes improve the work in question. Few fans of director Stanley Kubrick the brilliant the adaptation lamented the film’s lack of sensitive topiaries and many fans of the novel This were relieved when his infamous “sewer scene” was absent from the film and miniseries adaptations. However, King’s adaptations sometimes miss the mark when it comes to changing their source stories, as evidenced by the film version of Corn Children.
Released in 1984, the film adaptation of Corn Children failed to recapture the spooky atmosphere and nightmarish tone of Stephen King’s original short story from the collection night patrol. Part of the problem was Corn ChildrenKing’s failure to keep King’s shocking story ending intact, an understandable problem but one that resulted in much softer and less effective horror. Admittedly, killing off the story’s two heroes was a pretty brutal way for King’s story to wrap up the proceedings, but there are plenty of reasons why the Corn Children the film adaptation should have retained the original ending of the story.
The Children of the Corn Original Ending Explained
The basic accumulation of Corn ChildrenThe original short story and its subsequent film adaptation are the same. A bickering couple accidentally hit a child with their car on a lonely country road, then drove to the abandoned town of Gatlin in search of help. However, as This’s film adaptation and miniseries, the film version of Corn Children changes things after this point. In both versions of the story, the couple are separated upon arriving in Gatlin and encounter a spooky corn-themed church before a group of child cultists kidnap one of the story’s protagonists. However, in the original short story, the reader continues to follow the couple’s husband as he escapes the children, and the next time he meets his wife, she has already been murdered by the cult.
Why the Children of the Corn Movie Changed That Ending
In the film version of Corn Children, the husband remains the main POV character, but the adaptation also adds two adorable children who wanted to escape the cult to help him in his search for his wife. Stephen King’s adaptation of the short story then reunites the couple in time for the husband to save his wife, followed by the couple who defeat The One Who Walks Among The Rows and make it out of Gatlin with the two children in tow in the happy ending to the movie. . Presumably, the filmmakers thought killing the only sympathetic characters would be too cruel, especially when the survival of two young children now depended on him. However, dropping that depressing ending had a ripple effect that made Corn ChildrenMuch less successful horror attempts.
Why Children of the Corn Needed Its Original Ending
The problem with changing the ending of the short story for the film adaptation is that Corn ChildrenThe premise of is almost too ridiculous to be scary, even in its truncated original form. Like Stephen King Maximum overdrivethe night patrol the story becomes laughable when stretched into a feature film because conceits like killer kids and sentient trucks only work in short, standalone stories. In its original short story form, the entire Corn Children teeters on the edge of absurdity, and the only things that make the tale terrifying (rather than comical) are its brevity and brutality. Just when viewers are ready to laugh at the idea of children being a threat to the story’s heroes, the main character finds his wife’s corpse. Immediately after this, when viewers are certain that he will now take down the titular children in revenge, he is attacked by an unseen force far stronger than them in the story’s haunting ending.
Stephen King’s original short story leaves no room for readers to ponder plot logistics, as it all becomes nonsensical upon closer inspection. However, despite the memorable opening sequence of Corn Childrenof the film adaptation (in which the children brutally kill all the adults in town), the rest of the film depicts them as children – unable to stop or kill the adults who stumble in their town and easily defeated by the film’s bigger and stronger lead role. man. The novel’s abrupt original ending was necessary to make the titular threat seem serious, and without it, Corn ChildrenThe film adaptation of does not have a convincing antagonist.
How the Children of Corn Could Have Solved This Problem (But Didn’t)
The children of Corn Children aren’t particularly threatening in the film adaptation, thanks to their inability to kill The Terminator the heroine’s leading lady Linda Hamilton. However, they aren’t the only villains in the original novella. He Who Walks Among the Rows (later confirmed to be King Randall Flagg’s recurring antagonist) is the unseen force upon which the children feed adult sacrifices. This villain doesn’t suffer from the child problem of seeming too easily defeated to be scary. He who walks among the rows is a force of nature that seems almost divine in its power, and the monster is said to have provided Corn Children‘s adaptation with a compelling antagonist even without the film killing its leads. However, much like the 2020s The stall ruined Randall Flagg, Corn ChildrenThe film adaptation of turned He Who Walks Among the Rows into an invisible villain due to the film’s limited budget. This change made the potentially terrifying villain laughable and resulted in Corn Children having no effective antagonist since the eponymous children were too harmless to defeat the heroes and the invisible monster was barely touched on in the Stephen King movie.
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