A Brief Analysis of “Children of the Corn” and Clown in a Cornfield
By Jesse Bair
jbair@froidschool.com
According to Stephen King’s short story, “Children of the Corn” (1977), and Adam Cesare’s Young Adult horror novel, Clown in a Cornfield (2020), American culture is and has been placing the responsibility of overcoming ecophobia on its youth for decades. Simon Estok defines ecophobia as “an irrational and groundless hatred of the natural world” (“Ecocriticism and Ecophobia” 208, 210). Furthermore, that “hatred” creates distance between the human and nonhuman, as people attempt to assume power and control over the flora and fauna around them. The problem for the United States then becomes one of flexibility when a new relationship with nature becomes necessary to recover from hardships like economic collapse, because the unnecessary yearning to assert humanity’s uniqueness from all other life invites the opportunity to recognise alternatives as a threat. Moreover, placing the burden of bravery and innovation on youth risks their safety while simultaneously allowing the possibility for older generations to be considered a liability when a new relationship with nature becomes seemingly mandatory. I argue that Cesare and King’s texts portray this exact scenario, wherein their fictional communities experience the collapse of their ecophobic-based economic systems (mismanaged corn farming), and intergenerational conflict when the ecophobia of the adults transforms them into a threat in the eyes of their progeny.
Not too unlike the film with the same name, King’s short story take place after the reckoning of an ecophobic nightmare. Before adult outsiders, Burt and Vicky, make the fatal mistake of driving into the fictional town named Gatlin, the townsfolk are the victim of agricultural hardship. The culprit for Gatlin’s woes is never specified in the text, but the available scholarship on the film consistently links it to the 1980s Farm Crisis and the ecological mismanagement that led to it (see Hunt 203; Keetley 18; Newbury 127; Oman 83). In short, scholars connect the overproduction of corn during that time period as the likely culprit of the community’s now defunct economy. The ecophobia of the adult farmers leads them to see the land as their own, and thereby dedicating even more resources to unnecessary food production misuses the land and bankrupts their wallet when no one buys. The adults thereby fall victim to their ecophobic pride, and that leaves them vulnerable to retaliation from their children.
King gives one hint to the catalyst of Gatlin’s woes, and it proposes a religious imperative for the children to murder their parents. While exploring the local church, Burt gathers church records and pieces together his understanding of what harm came to the environment. He proposes “Maybe it [the corn] was dying. Maybe they got the idea somehow that it was dying because there was too much sinning. Not enough sacrifice” (27). When viewed with a connection to the Farm Crisis, the ecological mismanagement that led to it is a possible explanation of the “sinning.” Moreover, both Burt and scholars note the same cause and effect relationship: the human adults are offending the environment in some way and the nonhuman monster seeks retaliation. He Who Walks Behind the Rows, the story’s monstrous figure, is thereby purported to command the children to kill their parents to repent of the adults’ sins. That threat combined with no known alternative by the older generation to revitalise their community makes the youth’s parents more valuable as a sacrifice to save their lives than as guardians to protect and raise them in an unknown future.
Without the supernatural involvement of a monster, Cesare’s text follows a similar pattern of economic collapse to problematising the value of adults in the fictional Kettle Springs, Missouri. The economic mainstay is the Baypen Corn Syrup Factory, but its owner (Arthur Hill) closes it after his daughter Victoria dies from a diving accident at a high school party. The local economy nosedives without Baypen, which enrages the adults and inspires them to blame Victoria’s age group as violent and they conspire to kill them as they all dress as the clown mascot of their beloved factory. In turn, the adults’ ecophobia is also exposed when one of their victims, Glenn Maybrook, finds a pile of corn and the old town doctor rotting in Baypen’s basement. According to Estok and Ashley Kniss, decomposition blurs the boundary line that humanity relies on to assert their uniqueness from other life (“Shakespeare” 86; 68-69). Therefore, the townsfolk are not only hiding that blurring underground, but murdering the professional whose job it is to heal ailments implies that the adults are uninterested in hearing any alternatives to their economic woes besides reopening the factory. Moreover, preventing the rotting corn from fertilising other crops insinuates that the corn is for the factory and nothing else. Combined with being actual murderers, the adults are a liability both as opposers to necessary innovation to remake the town’s economy and as literal threats to the youth’s safety, so removing them from the situation becomes a necessity.
Humanity’s conflict with ecophobia will — and is — playing a role in our ability to adapt when the ecophobic thinking within our economies fail. Specifically, King and Cesare’s texts propose that maintaining such irrational thinking can prevent communities from adapting to such failures, but isolating the youth as innovators leaves adults vulnerable to harmful repercussions. Neither text gives insight into the adults weighing their options and alternatives, so it would only be speculation to say that their problems are avoidable after their disasters start. However, their ecophobic actions, like over farming and denying the crops nor their citizens the opportunity to alleviate their woes, exhibit how the value of older generations can be shifted towards the worst if they remain inflexible to when the infrastructure of their society collapses.
Works Cited
Cesare, Adam. Clown in a Cornfield. Kindle ed., Temple Hill, 2020.
Estok, Simon. Ecocriticism and Shakespeare: Reading Ecophobia. Kindle ed., Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
– -. “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 16, no. 2, 2009, pp. 203–25, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isp010.
Hunt, Kathleen. “‘Bring Him the Blood of the Outlanders!’: Children of the Corn as Farm Crisis Horror.” The Politics of Horror, edited by Damien K. Picariello, Kindle ed.,
Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, 203-217.
Keetley, Dawn. “Dislodged Anthropocentrism and Ecological Critique in Folk Horror:
From ‘Children of the Corn’ and The Wicker Man to ‘In the Tall Grass’ and Children of the Stones.” Gothic Nature Journal: New Directions in Ecohorror and EcoGothic, vol. 2, Mar. 2021, pp. 13–36. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspxdirect=true&db=mzh&AN=202122206007&site=ehost-live.
King, Stephen. Children of the Corn. Kindle ed., Vintage Books, 2016.
Kniss, Ashley. “‘The Hand of Deadly Decay’: The Rotting Corpse, America’s Religious Tradition, and the Ethics of Green Burial in Poe’s ‘The Colloquy of Monos and
Una.” EcoStudies in the Anthropocene, edited by Christy Tidwell and Carter
Soles, Kindle ed., Pennsylvania State UP, 2021, 68-88.
Oman, Patricia. “‘He Who Walks Behind the Rows’: Agricultural Horror Films and the American Farm Crisis of the 1980s.” Midamerica: The Yearbook of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature, vol. 39, 2012, pp. 82–99. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=2015384048&site=ehost-live.
Author Biography
Jesse Bair is the current English Teacher at Froid Public Schools in Froid, Montana. A community of roughly 196 people, who now has Mr. Bair cheering for their youth loudly and proudly during their academic ventures and athletic contests. Beyond school grounds, he has recently begun his other passion as an independent researcher; one whose publication history begins with this blog post and an upcoming publication on unrealistic Midwestern fiction. He received his Master’s in Children’s and Young Adult Literature at Central Michigan University, and his Bachelor’s in English Education at Montana State University. Additional academic accomplishments include interning with the Institute for the Study of Sport, Society, and Social Change to produce educational materials — and a short stint as a Student Representative on the Online Writing Association’s Executive Board.
