Children Of The Corn Pulled A Mean Trick On Linda Hamilton For The Movie's Best Scare
Stephen King's 1977 short story "Children of the Corn" has been adapted to film an embarrassing number of times. The first adaptation was a 1983 short called "Disciples of the Crow," and it was off to the races. The first feature in the franchise, directed by Fritz Kiersch, hit in 1984 and starred Linda Hamilton and Peter Horton as an innocent city couple who make the mistake of driving through Gatlin, Nebraska, a town that's been taken over by its under-16 population. The kids, following the directions of an off-screen demonic entity they call He Who Walks Behind the Rows, have murdered all the adults and set up their own blood cult. The protagonists run afoul of the kiddie cult and barely escape with their lives intact.
"Children of the Corn" was followed by eight sequels, released from 1993 through 2018. Few of them are good, although the monster design for "Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest" was done by the incomparable Screaming Mad George. "Children of the Corn" was also remade twice, in 2009 and again in 2020. Overall, that's 12 movies devoted to cereal grain.
In the original film, the Hamilton and Horton characters are drawn into the central action when a young boy staggers out onto the highway and is run over by their car. Naturally, they are mortified, although when then examine the body, they find that the boy already had his throat cut and was bleeding to death. Horton goes off to investigate, and Hamilton stays by the car to grieve the life of this poor dead boy.
It seems that Kiersch, interviewed for the making-of documentary "Harvesting Horror," wanted to use the car accident scene to play a harmless, but terrifying prank on Hamilton. That it wasn't a mannequin under there.
The terrifying prank
Kiersch describes the scene as above, explaining that Hamilton and Horton ran over a boy, and had to go get help. Hamilton was to walk around the outside of the car, totally distraught, and sit over the dead boy's body, covered by a blanket in the middle of the road, mourning. Kiersch and cast member Courtney Gaines (who plays the gruff redhead Malachi) figured this was the perfect time to give a jumpscare. Knowing that there were a lot of child actors in the film, shooting schedules and certain physical demands had to be limited, a fact that Hamilton knew and Kiersch exploited. The director said:
"I said, 'Linda, I'm sorry, you're gonna have to work with this mannequin. We couldn't put a child out there. You know, it's too hot, the child can only work for 10 minutes, but you're an actress, you're a trooper, I know you can grieve, I know you can carry this on.'"
Hamilton, of course, was game. Gaines gave the game away, saying:
"Fritz set something up. What they did was, when she was in the car there, [they] put the real kid underneath. They told us it was gonna be a dummy, right? [...] Everybody knew but her that the real kid was underneath there. And he stayed perfectly still until she got there."
I think we can all see what's coming. Kiersch again:
"I yelled, 'Now!' and she jumped back 22 feet. [...] And, to me, that's the best scare in the movie."
In the movie, that happened as well. A kid was supposed to leap up and startle the heroine. Kiersch just made just the scare was genuine.
What Linda Hamilton thought
"Children of the Corn" was Linda Hamilton's third feature film after the obscure "Night-Flowers" and Nick Castle's "TAG: The Assassination Game." She wasn't fond of it, and years later considered the horror film to be her worst movie. In a 1992 interview with Starburst Magazine (handily archived by TerminatorFiles.com) Hamilton took a dim view of several of her projects, calling her 1990 comedy film "Mr. Destiny," "a mediocre movie," But then, she continued:
"I've had more than my share of those. Nothing has beaten 'Stephen King's Children of the Corn' yet, which still haunts my past as the worst film I've made. Can you believe they're making a sequel? They didn't dare ask me to reprise that role!"
That interview was 32 years ago, so Hamilton hadn't yet seen "Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice," nor had she witnessed the great "Corn" glut. She did note in a short documentary called "It Was the Eighties!," that New World Pictures — Roger Corman's company — was notorious for making cheap movies and that the budget for "Corn" kept getting cut, forcing the filmmakers to leave out certain special effects. Overall, though, she did say that she had a good time making the film and that she remembers the experience fondly. Even though she was a little horrified that her character, after all the trauma experienced throughout the movie, thought to get back into her car. That, she said, was a bonehead maneuver.
Fun trivia: did you know that "Children of the Corn: Genesis" managed to repurpose footage from Michael Bay's "Bad Boys II?"