There you really lose the thread and loosen the plot of the saga. We are dealing with a young woman who comes to Gatlin to find her grandmother and when she arrives she finds a very strange situation in the ancient block of flats the grandmother lives in and the grandmother is nowhere to be found. But it all started with the grandmother, Hattie Soames, waking up in the middle of the night, the victim of a dreadful nightmare and she races outside her apartment and the building into the night wondering where someone is, calling for him.
Jamie arrives finds her grandmother missing, goes to the police where she meets a certain plainclothes officer Armbrister who does not react really. The following day, Jamie goes back to Armbrister. who has been doing some background checks on Jamie's missing grandmother. He has learned that sixty years ago, Hattie Soames was a child involved with a children's cult known as the Agents of Satan. The cult committed mass ritual suicide during a tent revival by setting themselves on fire. Hattie was the only one to survive. Jamie finds an old picture of her grandmother as a little girl with the cult leader, Abel. Armbrister agrees to accompany Jamie back to the apartment.
Some time and sequences later, one little boy drowns a stripper, Stephanie, three other little kids decide to kill one of the other tenants, a cranky wheel-chair-bound man and push him off the landing into the staircase shaft. Then they go ripping around the hallways playing in his wheelchair, when an older boy, Abel, appears and gets them under control. No more laughing, and no please, and no smile.
The last surviving tenant, Stan (note how his name sounds like Satan, and yet he is as harmless as a fly on a piece of cake), finds Jamie and warns her to get out of town. Stan then goes down to the basement where, surrounded by children, he is terrified out so much that he falls over dead.
The kids catch up with Jamie and take her down to the basement. The preacher child, Abel, and the rest of the brood come out to confront her. The ghosts are now seen with various burn marks and scars and one of the ghosts is Jamie's grandma Hattie. (A summary vastly edited from Headhunter's Horror House Wiki).P
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The only Biblical character is the Child-preacher Abel and this reference has little to do with the previous films, except that he is bound to be killed, destroyed, annihilated, like any respectful Abel by some Cain, though the film has no one close to this character. But let me retell you that story from the Bible.
Genesis 4: 1-16 (King James Version)
"1 And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the LORD. 2 And she again bare his brother Abel. And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground. 3 And in process of time, it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the LORD. 4 And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And the LORD had respect unto Abel and to his offering: 5 But unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect. And Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell. 6 And the LORD said unto Cain, Why art thou wroth? and why is thy countenance fallen? 7 If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him. 8 And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him. 9 And the LORD said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother's keeper? 10 And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground. 11 And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy hand; 12 When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth. 13 And Cain said unto the LORD, My punishment is greater than I can bear. 14 Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy face shall I be hid; and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth; and it shall come to pass, that every one that findeth me shall slay me. 15 And the LORD said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him. 16 And Cain went out from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden."
With such a Biblical heritage Abel can neither be a terrorist nor have any prone inclination to be violent, not to mention be a killer. And the only one who had a gun and could maybe kill some of these kids who are nothing but ghosts after all, or living dead, if he has special quicksilver cartridges or silver bullets. But he does not have none of neither (Holy Trinity of negatives), but the ghosts or living dead probably can't do too much damage, except frighten him to death. A good old heart attack to take care of him.
After that Jamie, note it is the feminine form of James, and James, Jesus' brother, ended very badly in the hands of the High Priest of the Jerusalem Temple, and that is a real horror story: to be thrown over the walls of Jerusalem, to be forced to undress completely, then to dig his own tomb or so, in which he is buried up to the neck and then finally to be stoned to death and abandoned to be a petit-four for the roaming dogs or wolves or whatever other night-time wild animals. Jamie is nearly getting there when she finally reaches the ground floor and the lobby of the apartment block in her hectic descent. Maize grows instantly everywhere and blocks her. She manages to extract herself from the lobby but it is not better outside She is nearly strangled by the Maize when Officer, or rather Detective Inspector Armbrister comes up and saves her from that horrible end.
To find corn that dreadful and menacing, there must be something wrong in the minds of spectators. Corn is absolutely harmless. To make it a monstrous cannibalistic vampiristic ghoul seems to plunge the roots of this fear in some very old culture that has nothing to do with good western, banal, European culture. This is normal since Maize is an American plant that only arrived in Europe relatively recently and definitely after the 16th century, just like potatoes in the 18th century. But the destruction of the nest of this ghostlike living dead cult is performed in a rather more effective way/ it is blown up systematically by the natural gas for the cookers in the apartments, one after another to the very last.
But the last touch on this Obsessive-Compulsive sequel of this mythic and cultish "Children of the Corn" story is the fact that train-tracks are running something like fifty yards from the entrance, and trains are regularly going by, and we are in the middle of nowhere. Who would accept to have luxury apartments or condominiums there? Probably insane people. And somewhere on the lower floors, there is a nursery growing with artificial light all kinds of vegetables. It was a little bit too early for marihuana, but I am sure in one corner or other there might have been some, well hidden under a table or behind leeks and pumpkins. Then high drug-addicts would not mind the trains if they could even hear them
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
