The Prom, the Fury, and the Pre-Scanners Shuffle

Before David Cronenberg made Scanners, the most gruesome cinematic exploration of psychic powers to come out of Hollywood were Carrie and The Fury, two Brian De Palma movies based on horror novels with decidedly different takes on the subject matter. Carrie is iconic, and made enough of a splash to kick off the massive industry in Stephen King adaptations; The Fury is less well-remembered. Both, in their own way, take what would on the face of it seem to be a cerebral subject – psychic powers – and take an extremely visceral approach to them.

Carrie

Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) is at the bottom of the social pecking order in her high school. She’s shy and socially withdrawn, not least because of the eccentric and extremist religious views of her mother Margaret (Piper Laurie), who swoops around town dressed in an old-fashioned style trying to peddle bizarre religious literature to people. Margaret’s brand of Christianity is one of those deeply misogynistic varieties; she believes that menstruation is a physical manifestation of sin, and believed that if she could just keep Carrie from sinning, Carrie would never have to suffer it.

So convinced is Margaret of this horseshit that she’s never told Carrie about menstruation – so when, in her senior year, she finally gets her first period in the middle of showering after gym class, Carrie is startled and traumatised. High school age kids having the astonishing capacity for cruelty to their peers that they do, her classmates treat it as the most absurdly hilarious thing they’ve ever seen, only heightening her panic. In the wake of the incident, Carrie discovers hitherto-unknown telekinetic abilities, whilst gym teacher Miss Collins (Betty Buckley), justifiably outraged by what the kids have done, dishes out a severe series of detentions to the culprits.

Revisiting the X-Files, Part 5: Hey, Did You Know We Have a Movie Coming Out?

So far on my X-Files rewatch we’ve seen the show’s muddled beginnings, cheered it on as it got good, savoured its prime, and tried to enjoy what we could as it gradually began its decline. (We’ve also glanced over at Millennium and gone “nah, can’t be bothered”.)

Now it’s time to look at season 5, produced in parallel with The X-Files: Fight the Future, the first movie. As we’ll see, that’s a circumstance which ended up overshadowing this season somewhat.

I noted how in the previous season the writing team had become somewhat contracted, and that’s exacerbated further this time. The inner circle has now contracted to just Chris Carter, Frank Spotnitz, John Shiban, and Vince Gilligan – four writers as opposed to seven last season – and once again, there’s much less outside contributions than in earlier seasons, with only three episodes having scripts which weren’t written outright or contributed to by those four people.

The season opens with another Chris Carter two-parter focusing on the mytharc, Redux and Redux II, resolving both the “did Mulder kill himself?” cliffhanger from last season (of course he fucking didn’t) and the “will Scully’s cancer be cured?” (of course it fucking will). The only really exciting aspect of the cliffhanger, really, is “Whose dead body is that in Mulder’s apartment that Scully misidentified as Mulder to cover for him?”, and the answer turns out to be “a generic agent of the Conspiracy we don’t care about”.

A Corny Trilogy

As far as Stephen King short stories go, Children of the Corn is a pretty good one – a neat example of King taking a diverse range of influences and mashing them up into a powerful mosaic. You’ve got a touch of Lovecraftian menace in the sinister deity, He Who Walks Behind the Rows, you have a nod or two to It’s a Good Life – the old Twilight Zone episode where the adults destroyed by the whims of an all-powerful child are euphemistically referred to as being “in the cornfield”, you have a shade of the same hippy-ers “don’t trust anyone over 30” generational warfare that Logan’s Run drew on and maybe a snifter of Animal Farm in the sense that an agricultural community is taken over and run by those you might not expect to be able to operate it, but do so through a form of despotic tyranny that has powerful real-world satirical parallels (theology-poor, bigotry-rich American Fundamentalism as opposed to Soviet Communism this time around) – all powerful stuff.

But at its heart, it’s a fusion of two main pieces of precedent: Lord of the Flies and The Wicker Man. The main stroke of genius on King’s part is to relocate the story not on a natural island in the literal sea, but in a sort of man-made island in a man-made sea of corn – namely, the state of Nebraska, where outside of Omaha and Lincoln you have vast expanses of corn that you could lose a few European nations in and never find them.

All this made the original short story good fodder for turning into a movie. (For one thing, as a short story it doesn’t have the masses of backstory that King stuffs into his novels and makes any movie adaptation of them a challenge.) A whole movie franchise, though? With a remake currently shooting in Australia, let’s see if the original series provided a nice regular harvest or whether the field should have been left fallow after the original.

Children of the Corn

Once upon a time in the Nebraskan town of Gatlin, a strange young boy called Isaac Chroner (John Frankin) was preaching to the kids out in the cornfield whilst the adults were gathered at church, as was his habit at that time. Two children were missing – Joby (Robby Kiger) was made to go to proper church by his parents, and his sister Sarah (Annie Marie McEvoy) was sick at home – so whilst they, as youths under the age of 19, are permitted to continue to exist by Isaac’s cult, they aren’t full members.

For a cult is what Isaac’s little congregation became that day; he had been given a revelation from He Who Walks Behind the Rows, and he set his congregants to work, slaying all the adults in the town. Three years later, Burt Stanton (Peter Horton) and his ladypal Vicky Baxter (Linda Hamilton) are driving through Nebraska, Burt having taken up a prize new intern’s position as a newly-qualified doctor in Seattle. Abruptly, they end up running into a child (Jonas Marlowe) in the middle of the road – when Burt examines the kid he discovers the lad was already fatally wounded, his throat having been slit by Malachi Boardman (Courtney Gains), Isaac’s sneering teenage lead enforcer, for the crime of trying to run away.

It’s the 1980s and a freshly-qualified doctor certainly doesn’t have a carphone in this era, not that he’d be likely to get reception here anyway; if they are going to alert the authorities, Burt and Vicky need find a phone, but when they enter Gatlin to look for one it’s a ghost town. Or at least, that’s what it looks like at first…