There are a lot of good-to-great Stephen King films… and then there’s the Children of the Corn series. For some reason, King’s short story “Children of the Corn,” originally published in a 1977 issue of Penthouse and added to his 1978 short story collection Night Shift, has spawned a ton of sequels and not one but two remakes. As of this writing, there are 11 (!!) Children of the Corn movies. How the heck did that happen? Well, for one thing, the first film, which came out in 1984, was a huge success — mostly because it was made pretty cheaply. And that then became the motto: make quick, cheap sequels and release them on home video (only the first two films, Children of the Corn and Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice, made it to theaters).

In King’s original short story, Burt and Vicky, a feuding married couple, are on a road trip to California and end up in the small town of Gatlin, Nebraska. The couple soon find out that all the adults in town are dead and the whole place is overrun by children who worship “He Who Walks Behind the Rows,” an evil deity who lives in the cornfields. This is more or less the plot of the first film, although King’s story ends on a pretty grim note: Burt and Vicky both die (RIP!), while in the film the couple comes out alive. As for the sequels, well… they go their own ways and while they keep the cult of corn-worshipping children alive, they have almost nothing to do with King’s original story (though I imagine he still gets a check every time they do something like that).

So are the Children of the Corn movies any good? No, not really! One weekend I teamed up with one of my friends to watch a marathon of all of the Children of the Corn movies. This friend and I enjoy watching bad movies, and we thought it would be fun to watch the series and laugh. But we were wrong. The sequels are so consistently bad that it’s almost impossible to enjoy them, even on a “so bad it’s good” level. When we finished watching the movies, we were both completely exhausted and miserable, and regretted having even decided to watch them.

Still, I think the first film, directed by Fritz Kiersch and starring Peter Horton and Linda Hamilton, has its charms. It’s certainly not Stephen King’s best film, but it has a creepy atmosphere that adds to the mood. King himself has expressed his dissatisfaction with the film over the years, although in the book Stephen King Goes to the Movies, the master of horror seems to take a more generous view of the whole affair. “The film version is a kind of avatar of ’70s horror movies – even the blood spilled looks like you’re snorting coke and disco to the first BeeGees song,” King writes. “But ah, come on… it’s not so bad. To me, it had a ‘Wicker Man’-esque feel (the first ‘Wicker Man’, the good one), and Linda Hamilton, who would later be glorious with ‘Terminator,’ definitely did her best.”

At the same time, however, King seems to find the reason why the film and all its sequels simply do not work: It is very difficult to make corn, well, frighteningAs King puts it, reading the short story allows you to use your imagination in ways that are not possible in the films. “Sometimes the story is better simply because the imagination never leaves the wayside,” says King. “I find the written version more scary because the corn is scarier. In the movies it just looks like that… corn. In the movies, corn will never hold a candle to Dracula.” I think King is absolutely right here: the original short story, which is short and simple, is really scary because it leaves us mostly in the dark. The movies, which get sillier as the story progresses, just can’t compete. But that probably won’t stop anyone from making another Children of the Corn movie at some point.