Children of the Corn

This past weekend, my cousin and I watched “Children of the Corn”. This movie really makes good use of the phrase “less is more”, much like Alfred Hitchcock movies. For the most part, the film relies very little on special effects to induce fear, instead using just a very disturbing concept and letting it speak for itself. Being a horror movie, there is actually very little gore shown, like in the opening scene, where several children stick a man’s hand into a meat slicer. The camera cuts away just before his skin hits the blade and instead shows blood spattering onto another character’s face. By doing this, it’s not shoving gore into your face to make you squeamish, but rather leaving a bit to the imagination. There’s a use of irony in that the “monsters” are all children. Usually, children are the innocent ones in horror movies, but in this case, they unquestioningly slaughter their entire town in the sake of a cult religion. The fact that they are still so impressionable, being children, yet capable of mindless slaughter is really the most frightening part. The score really helps to set the mood as well, using a children’s choir singing Latin verses in dramatic scenes, which heightens the creepiness, especially in the opening when they take out a diner full of elderly church-goers. For the camera work in this scene, there are several close-up shots of coffee cups, which contain poison for the customers. After they start to keel over, several more choppy close-ups of the dropped cups are shown, along with cleverly placed ceramic cornstalks, which uses Mis en scene.