🌽 Children of the Corn (2020/2023) Review

“This crop should’ve stayed buried.”


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Lets start by showing y’all the trailers shall we?

🎥 Trailers

The trailers teased a “modern reimagining” of Stephen King’s short story, but what audiences got was a confused, cheap-looking mess that proved not all horror needs resurrecting.


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📖 Non-Spoiler Plot Overview

This remake ditches the couple-stumbling-into-town setup and instead focuses on a small Nebraska community where the children revolt against the adults. A mysterious force in the cornfields influences them, and led by a new child preacher, the kids take up arms against their parents. What should feel like a chilling update comes off as incoherent, sloppy, and weirdly tame for a story about children murdering grown-ups.


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🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Character Rundown

Eden (Kate Moyer): The pint-sized cult leader of this version. She’s sinister on paper, but the script gives her little to work with beyond “evil child leader.”

Bo (Elena Kampouris): The main teen protagonist, trying to resist the madness, but blandly written.

The Adults: A mix of forgettable, whiny characters who barely register before being picked off.

The Children: Instead of being truly terrifying, they come off like a poorly directed group of extras playing “creepy.”



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⏱️ Pacing / Episode Flow

The movie drags despite being under 90 minutes. Long stretches of exposition and dull dialogue bog down any momentum. When the killings start, they’re either off-screen or bloodless, undercutting the entire point of a Children of the Corn story. By the time the climax stumbles into CGI nonsense, you’re just waiting for the credits to roll.


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✅ Pros

It ends.



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❌ Cons

Terrible script with no tension or scares.

Characters are flat, shallow, and unlikable.

Eden as a villain never reaches Isaac or Malachai levels of menace.

Weak, cheap-looking CGI ruins the “He Who Walks Behind the Rows” reveal.

Tries to modernize the story, but strips away what made the original creepy.



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💭 Final Thoughts

This remake is everything wrong with unnecessary reboots. It ignores what worked in the original, adds nothing new, and delivers a product so lifeless it barely qualifies as horror. Children of the Corn has been milked for decades with endless sequels and spin-offs, but this may be the most pointless entry of them all. If you thought the 1984 original was middling, this one makes it look like a masterpiece by comparison.


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⭐ Rating

1/10 — Painfully bad. Flat, joyless, and utterly unnecessary. This cornfield is barren.


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⚠️ Spoiler Warning ⚠️

🕵️ Spoilers

The film opens with Eden, a child preacher, killing adults who fail to protect the crops. Bo tries to resist but gets swept up in the chaos as the children begin slaughtering the town’s adults. Unlike the original, the deaths are watered down — often happening off-screen or through laughably bad CGI.

The supposed “big bad,” He Who Walks Behind the Rows, is reduced to a generic CGI monster that looks unfinished. Instead of awe or dread, it inspires laughter. The climax is a blur of bad effects and poor editing, ending with Bo and the remaining children swallowed by the fields.

Where the original left behind eerie ambiguity, this one leaves you with nothing but frustration. It’s not scary, it’s not fun, and it’s not worth your time.


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🌽 Compare: 1984 vs 2020/2023

The 1984 film wasn’t perfect — it dragged in places and the effects haven’t aged well — but it at least captured the disturbing essence of Stephen King’s story: the idea of children turning against adults under a cult-like faith. Isaac and Malachai were iconic villains, and the prologue massacre remains chilling.

The 2020/2023 remake, meanwhile, throws away nearly everything that worked. It trades the eerie setup of outsiders stumbling into a cursed town for a clumsy “kids vs adults” civil war. Instead of unsettling atmosphere, it offers dull exposition. Instead of iconic villains, it gives us Eden — a one-note antagonist. And the practical eeriness of the original “He Who Walks Behind the Rows” is replaced by embarrassingly bad CGI.

In short: the original was average but memorable. The remake is forgettable and embarrassing.