Welcome to another episode of Less People. I’m Jenny Russell. So this is the last installment of our review of the Rural Horror Picture Show from Rural Remix.
And this one involves Children of the Corn, which I’ve actually never seen and I have to go actually watch that now. So Children of the Corn and the Blair Witch Project, which I have actually seen. I remember when that came out and they talk about the marketing around this movie and how brilliant it was for the time and getting people to think it was a real thing where people went into the woods and never came back.
The ways that basically rural is associated with Christianity. I thought that was really interesting as well. The British were worried about witches and pre-Christian beliefs.
So paganism, things that happened before Christ, before those things came about. And this one says the U.S. worried about weird Christians and cults. So that’s interesting as well.
So I think that’s another example of othering. Us versus them. They’re different than us.
Change. Change is hard and is not necessarily bad, but it does challenge your normal. That’s scary to a lot of people. So resisting that change and wanting that things to stay the same. Wondering and worrying about those that are different than us because they’re unknown.
That’s big as well. I would say that American folk horror has sort of the same underlying tensions of British folk horror, but what we’re worried about is a little bit different. And so British, very concerned about witches.
Americans are also concerned about witches because we had the Salem witch trials. There is that history and that sort of cultural presence. But instead of paganism and these old pre-Christian practices being the main source of religious or superstitious stress in the United States, we’re more worried about what somebody in the documentary calls, quote, weird Christians.
So early colonial settlers were by definition sort of weird Christians. And that tradition has continued strongly in the United States. There are a lot of different types of all religions and also different types of Christianity.
And some types of Christianity originated sort of in the United States, Mormonism being that one. But there are also more fundamentalist groups that we could think of like the Mennonites, the Amish, even the Shakers. So one element of our folk horror is sort of this fascination with and fear of what we would define as weird Christians, which also overlaps with cults sometimes.
And when we think about some of these groups, Amish, Mennonites, and Mormons, they’re also all associated really strongly with rurality. So that sort of helps loop things back into the folk horror narrative. I would say that the other tension of folk horror that’s really important, and this sort of overlaps with occult movies, and the occult can be defined as any sort of spiritual practice that is not really bound by organized religion, think witches, think Ouija boards, that kind of thing.
So something that all occult movies have in common, whether or not they’re considered folk horror, is this tension between modern science and the old ways. So modern science versus magic. And very, very commonly, that tension is played out by the protagonist, who is generally a white man and a white man of science, of logic, of modernity.
He has to figure out what’s going on, which is generally magic, right, or in some form or fashion. He has to both come to believe in the magic, and then learn how to solve the problem in a magical way, because the scientific explanations and scientific solutions aren’t working. That is sort of the fundamental plot line of all of these movies.
Yeah, that’s super interesting, because it feels like we have this like Urbanoia trope yet again, of, you know, one modernity versus lack of. But what’s really interesting is you said that the modern science man needs to learn to believe in the magic. And that feels so different from what we’ve been talking about, because there’s no, you know, the canoers and deliverance didn’t learn to understand the ways of local people.
That wasn’t what was happening. So I think that it’s a similar tension, but this interesting, like you need to solve it with the magic, with the supernatural in some way is so interesting. I’m excited to see how it plays out in these movies.
Yeah, totally. And it’s sort of making the argument that supernatural problems require supernatural solutions. So sink or swim, right? But no, I mean, really good point that it is similar to Urbanoia and sort of like any other horror movie, like the killer hillbilly trope.
They all have the same underlying tension within their little subgenre. But the politics of the movie can still be read by how these things are handled. And that brings us to our first movie, which is Children of the Corn, released in 1984, adapted from a Stephen King short story that was published in 1977, I think written in 1976.And this one is really interesting to talk about, because the short story and the movie are different in really meaningful ways that ultimately affects the message that you walk away with. Okay, so what is going on in this movie? Yeah, so the movie is about a couple named Bert and Vicki. They are a young couple.
Bert is a doctor. He is a man of science, as you see. Vicki is his partner, who we don’t know what she does, because it doesn’t matter.
It’s 1984, who cares? She’s so pretty. But she’s pretty. And they are driving through Nebraska on the way to his medical internship, and they’re sort of fighting.
They’re not getting along that well. It’s clear that she wants to get married, and he’s like, I just need to do my medical internship. And so they are driving through miles and miles and miles of cornfields.
But this monotony is broken in a dramatic fashion when a young boy stumbles into the road and Bert runs him over. So obviously, they’re freaking out. That’s no good.
But they look closer at the body, and they see that his throat has been cut. So that’s not a car injury. His throat was cut before he ran into the road.
And so they go to look for help, and the nearest place is a place called Gatlin. And when they get to Gatlin, they realize that it’s empty. Like, there is nobody there.
It’s eventually revealed at the very beginning of the movie, actually, in the middle of the short story, that some time ago, all of the children of this community murdered all of the adults. They murdered anybody who was over the age of 19, and they did it in the movie. It’s shown with poison and knives and, like, field tools.
Gruesome. Yeah, super gruesome. And they did this because there is an entity called He Who Walks Behind the Rose, and he demands it.
And so, long story short, Bert and Vicki are attacked by the kids in the movie. They manage to sort of fight back and deliver speeches about rationality. And then with the help of some of the kids, they are able to burn down the cornfield and therefore defeat He Who Walks Behind the Rose.
In the short story, they are gruesomely murdered and sacrificed. He Who Walks Behind the Rose. Tough.
And they die. Well, that is a big difference. I mean, just having the fates of our main characters be so completely opposite, I am curious as to why that change was made.
Maybe just more enjoyable to watch a movie where things end okay? I don’t know. Maybe. The funny thing about this is that I’m not sure Stephen King has ever been to a real cornfield before he wrote this short story, because if you’ve been to a real cornfield, the rows are pretty close together and there’s not a lot of room to breathe.
And once you get in there, it’s very pokey in terms of the leaves are very sharp edged, if you actually get near them. And it’s humid and stifling and very claustrophobic. So I don’t know that he who lives behind the corn would really like it that much being in there.
And I’m not sure that you would really be able to hide much in the fall when the corn ripens up. And I’m not sure a green cornfield would actually burn. So there’s a lot of logistical concerns about the story, but we’ll let it go at that.
Okay, so what is going on in this movie? Yes. Yeah. So what did you have any sort of first impressions or thoughts about this movie? Yeah, this movie is really interesting.
It’s creepy in different ways than a lot of the ones we watch. I think that’s sort of the classic children are scary. You know, I’m thinking about the twins from The Shining, like a Chucky doll, like that kind of little kids doing something creepy is extra, extra scary.
I don’t really know. I’m sure there’s you can do a whole analysis, but you just don’t expect evil from them in the way that you might expect evil from an adult. Mm hmm.
Children are pretty scary. At least that’s what I say sometimes when when your kids are something else. But I get what they’re saying here that children are not children are almost always born good.
Yeah, I think that’s what our general perception is, is that babies are perfect babies are born good, and the world corrupts them. So when you see a child in a movie portrayed as something as someone who is extremely evil or scary or in charge of making really bad decisions that really scares us as a society because children are not supposed to be inherently evil. So there’s some really strong, scary children in this good child acting some notable good job being scary.
I also was kind of obsessed with how they depicted when we finally see when we finally see he who walks behind the rose, just an awesome 1980s computer graphic of a monster. Oh my god, it really made me feel so much less afraid. Yeah, for anyone who hasn’t seen this movie.
I mean, this 80s graphic. I mean, is this super pixelated, sort of red and yellow something. It’s like not really a flame quite that sort of engulfs people, like emotions. It’s so awful. And the movie is genuinely creepy at points.
And at that point, yeah, you totally lose it. I mean, even in 1984, I cannot imagine this being something that people were impressed by or afraid of. Despite the depiction of the monster not being that scary.
There were like really creepy, scary things in there. Like the attempted crucifixion of Vicky was really just freaked me out. I found it jarring.
And yeah, I mean, certainly, sort of the weird Christianity you were talking about seems really prevalent in this movie. Yeah. What was going on with how religion was represented? Yeah, yeah.
Good question. This is a textbook case of weird Christianity. There are all sorts of biblical things going on.
All of the kids have taken on biblical names. So they used to be called something else. Now they’re called Job and Isaac and Malachi and you know, sort of these old fashioned biblical names.
They also are shown in the movie to be rewriting the Bible. Obviously, crucifixion is a super important part of this. The kid who is killed, initially they find in his suitcase sort of a corn cob crucifix.
So yeah, Christianity is clearly the starting off point for this. But it does differ in some critical ways. Once again, the historical context of this short story and film.
Yeah. So short story is written in the mid to late 70s. The film comes out in 1984.And this is an era of televangelism has become really popular. It’s gone mainstream in a lot of ways. During the Reagan administration, there’s a very active group of televangelists who formed what they call the moral majority.
And they’re all of these personalities who are really famous. They’re TV stars, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, they have a huge following and they’re very active on the national stage politically. And something that this movie really does is that it’s very interested in critiquing religious fundamentalism, but they’re also really interested in pushing sort of this evangelical moment out into rural.
Yeah. And so you can hear immediately, they’re setting themselves up, first of all, making fun of the preacher, but also setting themselves up. They are college graduates.
They are people who watch public television and are not rural evangelical Christians. But once again, you know, this is sort of a fallacy.
This sort of evangelical religiosity is not at all confined to rural places. Absolutely. It wasn’t in the 70s and 80s.It isn’t now. There’s some really great reporting by a daily under reporter Sarah Malott, which shows that rural people are not necessarily more likely to attend church than urban people. Basically, every other demographic difference is a stronger factor than whether they live in a rural or urban area.
But we all have this perception of rural places as having more churches per capita and being inherently more religious, when actually people’s real life religious practices do not differ widely, depending on whether they live in rural or urban places. I think, again, here’s this othering about, oh, rural areas are so much different than urban, when really urban has just as many different churches and just as many evangelical Christians. So othering people makes you feel like they’re different than you, but really we’re a lot the same.
I think that’s a really important point because I feel that that is a perception so common. And I think a lot about, you know, when we see this young couple and they turn on the radio. I mean, I feel like I’ve experienced something like this of on a road trip and you see those billboards that are, you know, called this number to be saved.
And I think those very clear signs of religion are often you see on a road trip, maybe you’re driving through a more rural area, things like that. And I certainly know I’ve had misconceptions about what religion is like in an urban versus rural environment. So I think it’s important to examine.
I think that’s a really important point because I feel that that is a perception so common. And I think a lot about, you know, when we see this young couple and they turn on the radio. I mean, I feel like I’ve experienced something like this of on a road trip and you see those billboards that are, you know, called this number to be saved.
And I think those very clear signs of religion are often you see on a road trip, maybe you’re driving through a more rural area, things like that. And I certainly know I’ve had misconceptions about what religion is like in an urban versus rural environment. So I think it’s important to examine that and think critically about it as opposed to just sticking with what is maybe commonly told or taught.
Yeah. And I mean, also, just if we think about certain types of evangelicalism, the megachurch, right? These churches that have thousands and thousands of people, they’re not predominantly rural phenomenons. The biggest megachurch in the United States is in Houston.
Yeah. With 43,500 weekly visitors, right? Of course, evangelicalism and fundamentalism are not necessarily the same thing. Sure.
And Children of the Corn came out the same year that the original Footloose movie came out, right? And that is another small town situation, which is not dissimilar from what these kids do. They do end up outlawing music and toys and games and anything fun and modern, not unlike the Footloose town. But the difference is you never expect the children to be the one who are like, no music, no fun.
And in Footloose, you know, the kids, the kids want to dance and in Children of the Corn, the kids are the ones stopping the fun, which I guess, again, goes back to the when children are evil and scarier. Yes. And the other thing that this movie does, it’s pushing evangelicalism and fundamentalism out into rural, but it’s also conflating these actually genuine, quote unquote, weird Christian groups, like much like the Mennonites, which are pacifist groups.
True. And portraying them as sort of inherently violent, right? Because these kids are doing a lot of things that these groups do and believe in, like sort of the ban technology and things like that. But they’re using scythes and knives and all sorts of little farming tools to hunt and try to kill and sacrifice our two protagonists.
Yeah. I also watched that three hour long documentary. And one of the things I really felt like was a big takeaway from their description of Folklore is that change is what is scary, like change in traditions, change in weather, change in communities, because like a lot of time they’re talking about, I think the word they used was hauntology, like this idea of an unresolved past coming back to haunt you, whether like a social or cultural past.
And I think it’s really interesting in this movie, an unresolved past of Christianity kind of being stuck in a different time. There’s something about going back to the old biblical names, but like a distorted version of Christianity that really feels like it’s kind of this hauntology, this change is scary, taking a religious thing and distorting it, making it not pacifist, not normal. And I think also the way that it sort of addresses the fundamental tensions of Folklore is twofold.
One is that Bert makes this plea at some point where he sort of he’s figuring out the religiosity of all of this. And he’s like, whoa, whoa, whoa, this isn’t how religion should be. And he makes this logical plea.
Here it is. Just because some self-proclaimed holy man said this is what God commands. What kind of a God tells his children to kill their parents? Answer me that, buddy.
I can’t believe you’re this blind. Maybe you’ve been listening to these holy rollers so long. It’s all started to sound the same.
Well, it’s not. Any religion without love and compassion is false. It’s a lie.
And so he’s saying that sort of while he’s in the circle of the children, they’re trying to sacrifice Vicky. He’s trying to cut her down and escape with her. He makes this whole plea and then is immediately confronted with Isaac, who has been killed and then repossessed by who walks behind the rose.
So he says, this isn’t real. And then he sees it with his own eyes and he sort of goes, oh, and he and Vicky run away. But he does in the end, in the end of the movie, embrace what’s going on enough to fix it.
He realizes that one of the adults previously who had been killed had been trying to kill he who walked behind the rose based on sort of an extrapolation from a Bible verse. So you need the Bible verse to sort of point you in the right direction. The right direction is burning down the field, which it feels like maybe you could have figured out without the Bible verse.
But importantly, in the movie, that is what he uses to get there. So that is sort of him embracing that you have to sort of get on their level in order to solve the problem. So like in the short story, since you said they don’t survive, is there not an embracing of the religion for them? Yes, exactly.
So Vicky pretty much is immediately carried off and sacrificed gruesomely. Her eyes are gouged out. Yeah, it’s gross.
And she’s crucified. Bert survives longer and sort of was trying to save her, but is wandering through the rose. And he comes upon the realization that he who walks behind the rose is real and is sort of out to get him because he’s just killed by him.
But what’s interesting is that the story doesn’t end with Bert and Vicky being killed. It returns to the children, where he who walks behind the rose is displeased with the nature of the sacrifice of Bert and therefore lowers the acceptable age that you can live to from 19 to 18. So everyone who is 18 going to turn 19 has to go sacrifice themselves.
And it sort of returns this uneasy peace between the children and he who walks behind the rose who they serve. In the short story, there is no reckoning. And notably, even with the help of the Bible and embracing the magic, Bert and Vicky in the movie drive off with their two favorite children, presumably to form a happy nuclear family and returns the world of science and logic and medicine because Bert is a doctor.
And in the short story, they’ve failed to bend. They’ve failed to figure out what’s going on, that there was really much of a chance for them to and they’re just dead. And this dark demonic presence in this town continues.
This really speaks to the fact that you need people from all different backgrounds on your board and in your decision making because of our backgrounds, we have different opinions about how things should go and the solutions to different problems. Also, I feel like this whole thing about we need to find a solution that is down on the person’s level, you definitely need to have an understanding of your audience and what their motivations are to be able to come up with programming and solutions that really fit what they need. And that is another important takeaway for real economic development work from this series.
As it has been going for 10 years, and you’re sort of left with the feeling that it’s still out there somewhere, which again, is very different reading from the triumph of science and logic, which is what happens in the movie. Yeah, a triumph of science and logic, but aided through a Bible verse. Yes, exactly.
In the movie, it’s enough for him to figure it out, but it’s not enough for there to be this complete conversion. You don’t get the feeling that his way of life has changed forever now. It was dipping his toe in.
Yeah, he hasn’t embraced anything. Truly, he’s just opened a Bible. He cracked it open for a spin.
Yeah. Yeah. There’s a really fun one that also is pretty iconic.
It is the Blair Witch Project. I love the Blair Witch Project. Yes, the Blair Witch Project is so much fun.
It is so famous for so many reasons. It is sort of the movie that popularized the found footage or sort of mockumentary style in horror movies, which is now something that we’ve seen for decades. But this movie came out in 1999.There’s this title card at the beginning of the movie that sort of introduces the premise. It says, in October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland, while shooting a documentary. A year later, their footage was found.
Something really notable about this movie wasn’t just the movie itself, but the way that it was released. About six months before the movie came out, the people who made it hired a web designer, because this is 1999, to make a website. On this website, there are missing posters of the three actors who used their real names.
It’s trying to convince people that these people really have gone missing while trying to film a documentary. People really, really believed that actually this was real footage and that the people had in real life gone missing. It’s one of my absolute favorite movie lores.
Their marketing techniques were so creative and unusual, and they really convinced people. It was so effective. I think it’s one of those things that’s a little hard for us to imagine now.
There’s so much on the internet. I wouldn’t say that we all do a perfect job of sifting through what’s fake and what’s real, but there’s a skepticism about what is on the internet now that I think they probably couldn’t get away with it today. But they’re the first people to ever do it, and so it worked.
Yeah, totally. A brief description of what happens in the movie is that these three students are trying to make a documentary. They go around and interview the townsfolk of Burkittsville before heading off into the woods.
Things sort of start happening at night, and they escalate more and more, and then they realize that they’re lost. They’ve lost their map, and they sort of are wandering around the woods for a few days as things get progressively creepier, and in the end, presumably, they die. But you never really see anything really on camera other than sort of weird stuff that they’re finding in the woods.
You hear noises, but you never see the monster, and you don’t know exactly how it happens, but you know enough to know that they do not make it. Yeah, I love the fact that you don’t see the Blair Witch. You don’t see what’s scary, and I think it’s a really good contrast to Children of the Corn because we talked about how sort of unscary it was once we saw He Who Walks Behind the Rose, but it’s almost I think it just adds a lot to the folk horror, the folklore of it, right?
Because you don’t see it, it remains unresolved, and it adds to this audience speculation and confusion because it’s still unknown, and I think we’ll talk a lot about this in our next episode of what that means for an audience to think that something is maybe real and to think and to have no real answers or visualization of what is scary.
Yeah, and also critically that Burkittsville, Maryland is a real place. Absolutely. And yeah, I mean, I think something about this movie is that it does fit a lot of general folk horror conventions.
It’s set in the woods, it’s about an old supernatural force, specifically a witch, which again we’ve already talked about why we have those. It’s sort of a local story or a local secret. Townspeople don’t necessarily believe in it, but they believe in it enough to not go into the woods.
And some of them do say openly that they’ve seen it, and there is also an urban oil element to all of this, right? They are not from here, they go into it, and in fact for a good part of the movie, their explanation for what’s going on and what’s happening to them is that the locals are messing with them. They also have some takes that could be argued as sort of from an eco lens. Heather specifically keeps on repeating that it’s impossible for them to be lost in the woods for that long.
There’s simply not enough natural space, natural resources left in the country these days for anyone to really get lost in the woods, which is patently untrue, but does sort of have that environmental narrative. Yeah. And the thing about these three filmmakers who are there is they are skeptics.
The take is very much they’re rational, they’re logical, they’re modern in the sense that they’re literally with their technology and their camera equipment into the woods. They don’t believe in the supernatural. They’re going to make this documentary about it, but it’s filled with skepticism.
They’re ready to kind of make fun of the situation until they’re hit in the face with it, and then the fear sets in, then the realization. But it takes that reckoning, awakening of being literally forced to believe it. Yes, which is sort of the fundamental tension of folk horror, right? And I mean to the point about them being skeptics, they meet a woman who says, I’ve met the Blair Witch, this is what I saw, and the next thing is them in the car making fun of her.
Yeah, it’s almost like their documentary they’re trying to make is, look how silly these believers are, and not an explanation really into the lore of it. But if their journey from skepticism to belief is what this occult folk horror movie is all about, and what every occult folk horror movie is all about. So these movies have really different settings, and I think it’s been really interesting to see how they’re both folk horror, but in pretty starkly different ways.
But the thing they have in common, as all the movies that we’re talking about on this podcast do, they’re rural. Yeah, they are. And I think that’s something that we’re seeing in doing this podcast, is that there’s so much overlap.
These are rural folk horror movies. They’re also urbanoia movies. The Killer Hillbilly movies were also urbanoia movies.
And the mutant cannibal element of The Hills Have Eyes is a little more sci-fi, I would say, than it is occult. But these movies are separate, and the reason that we sort of separated them out is because they are both movies with a genuine supernatural element. Yeah.
Whereas the rest of the movies that we watch we’re sort of about scary rural people with no added element of magic or belief. These are different, but at the same time they still follow so many of the other things that we’ve been seeing from the urban people coming into the rural area. Also, especially the location of backwards, creepy, scary things in the rural place as opposed to the urban place which represents progress like it always seems to. Yeah.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Less People. I’m your hostess, Jenny Russell. We hope that you’ll join us next time on this podcast. In the meantime, you can check out our consulting and speaking services. We hope that you will listen to some of these podcasts in our two seasons of Less People and share them with your friends. Happy 4th of July weekend, and we will see you soon.