Children of the Corn

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes references to graphic violence, death, horror themes, and domestic violence.

A contentious marriage, an ill-fated road trip, and a cult of killer children are conventional ingredients for a horror story. But, beneath its nod to Gothic horror conventions, “Children of the Corn” reflects the anxieties and uncertainties of its time, focusing primarily on a societal unease with Religious Fanaticism and a Fear of the Unknown.

The fear of the unknown is reflected in Burt and Vicky’s road trip and in their uncertainty about their marriage. As they drive the long, weary miles from Boston to California, they are each struggling to find the right path, both on the road and in their relationship, although they are both processing these concerns in incompatible ways. Burt turns the radio up, hoping that the sheer volume will prevent the onslaught of another argument. Vicky suggests stopping for lunch to give Burt a break from driving and offer both an opportunity to connect and unwind over a meal, although she hides her desire for connection behind a sarcastic comment about how long he made them drive the day before.

The tension in their dialogue, along with Burt satirically comparing their destructive behavior to America’s attrition in the Vietnam War, illustrates the pervasive fear in the 1970s that the American family—and marriage as an institution—was declining. As the couple drives through the quiet isolation of Nebraska farmland, they don’t quite know where they are on the map or how their relationship will fare. The possibility that they might divorce seems at least as real as the possibility that they might find themselves lost or stranded on a lonely stretch of highway with nowhere to shelter. Their physical jeopardy parallels the morally charged jeopardy of marital breakdown in the 1970s.

These uncertainties dominate their focus until they realize that their car has hit a young boy. Although he feels sickened by the knowledge that he has accidentally taken a child’s life, Burt remains outwardly calm and solution-driven, while Vicky devolves into shrieking “hysterics.” Their opposite reactions to the acutely stressful situation leads Burt to realize that “he wasn’t having an identity crisis or a difficult life transition or any of those trendy things. He hated her. He gave her a hard slap across the face” (260). Although Burt has slapped Vicky when she is “hysterical”—then considered an acceptable way to jolt someone out of panic—he previously gripped the steering wheel hard to stop his hand “fly[ing] off […] to hit [Vicky…] right in the chops” (259), which frames his violence toward her very differently: as something he has either done before or wanted to do before. With Burt and Vicky’s marriage crumbling, they stand opposite each other over the dead body of a child, and their fear of the unknown and the flagrant Decline of the American Family converge into the story’s central conflict: the frightful brutality of religious fanaticism.

The story now explores the effect of fear on the psyche. Although Burt—a war veteran—acts coolly, the rustling corn matches—or causes—a shiver of fear. When driving on toward the town of Gatlin—the site of the story’s climax—Burt feels attacked by a preacher on the radio yelling the word “ATONEMENT!” as though he is personally being required to repent for hitting the boy with his car. After the preacher launches into a rant about the sins that prevent one from entering the mansions of the Lord, Burt hears the inexplicable phrase, “[n]o room for the defiler of the corn” (263). This conjures the image Burt has noticed earlier, the “neat, shaded rows,” “broken” and “bloody” where the boy came through. The preacher introduces the corn as a symbol of the illusion of the American dream; his words connect the corn to abundance but also foreshadow the eerie dominance of the corn that surrounds the deserted town of Gatlin, overtaken by a malevolent force.  

The sense of premonition that the story creates with this layering is essential to its creation of suspense, an undefined fear of the unknown. Similarly, Vicky’s repeated, almost incantatory references to stories of childhood religious abuse on the journey to Gatlin lay the groundwork for the frightening buildup of fanatical signs as they approach and, later, the desecrated church Burt encounters there and the warped Christian imagery of the cult. Although Vicky has been “hysterical” when Burt has been calm, it now seems that her fears are wiser than his courage: She literally and figuratively reads the signs—their warning significance—in a way that seems natural, and his refusal to turn around and drive on to a different town reads as machismo or contrariness. Too late, Burt realizes that the sanctuary he seeks—originally called Grace Baptist Church—has been distorted into something devoid of grace, mercy, or any of the virtues traditionally espoused by Christianity. As Burt’s exploration of the church intensifies, King employs juxtaposition and deconstruction to highlight the binary oppositions that define the story. Love and hate, innocence and evil, faith and fear, natural and supernatural are opposites that define each other and that characterize Burt’s discovery in the abandoned chapel. For example, when Burt finds the book of birth and death dates, he begins to form a picture of Gatlin’s dark history, surmising:

They got religion and they killed off their parents. All of them. Isn’t that a scream? Shot them in their beds, knifed them in their bathtubs, poisoned their suppers, hung them, or disemboweled them, for all I know. Why? The corn. Maybe it was dying. Maybe they got the idea somehow that it was dying because there was too much sinning. Not enough sacrifice. They would have done it in the corn, in the rows (276).

This paragraph exemplifies the core horror in the town of Gatlin, where all things traditionally conceptualized as being good have been distorted. Children—regarded as symbols of purity and innocence—have become perpetrators of violence. Religious faith—often associated with virtues such as mercy, peace, and compassion—has been distorted into a twisted fanaticism that is used as justification for brutality. The dichotomy between the natural and supernatural comes to the forefront as Burt wonders, “How could such a thing be kept secret? How could it go on? How unless the God in question approved?” (277). In entertaining the idea of an alternate, malign “god,” Burt’s own thoughts introduce the first mention of a dark supernatural power. Again, with this foreshadowing of real future events in fearful thoughts, the boundary between the real and the imagined is blurred. Burt’s questions illustrate the limits of his rational understanding that the children’s faith is not just distorted—it is a fanatical cult driven by a belief in a malevolent entity. He slips into thinking that this entity doesn’t only exist in the minds of the children but in reality too. By suggesting that the children of Gatlin may be under the grip of a “real” supernatural evil, King introduces the Gothic element of the supernatural and asks whether it is more frightening to assign evil to the supernatural or to humans themselves.

Burt’s increasing uncertainty lays the groundwork for the introduction of He Who Walks Behind the Rows and the unsettling possibility that Burt may be an unreliable narrator. To Burt, the demon who controls the children appears as “something huge, bulking up to the sky…something green with terrible red eyes the size of footballs. Something that smelled like dried cornhusks years in some dark barn” (284). King renders it unclear whether He Who Walks Behind the Rows is real or a manifestation of Burt’s descent into fearful madness, whether the children really believe in him or if he is an entity they have invented to justify their brutality. By presenting the story from a third-person limited point of view, allowing selective access to the thoughts and experiences of the primary characters, King intensifies the horror and suspense. By withholding information and gradually unveiling the horrors at the heart of Gatlin, King invokes the primal fear that comes with the pervasive uncertainty of the human experience and the unknowableness of other people.

The story allows children to be evil, loving relationships to turn to hate, and faith to be distorted into a justification for cruelty. These recognizable truths at the heart of the narrative’s horrors make the story more frightening than a supernatural tale of a demon who terrorizes farm towns. King implies that the true horror lies in the very real fears that humanity has about itself.