Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished - Revised & Expanded Edition (21 page)

Charlie (Undated
) 

The manuscript of
Charlie
is held in Box 1010 of the Special Collections Unit of the Raymond H. Fogler Library at the University of Maine, Orono. Written permission from King is required to access this work. The manuscript shows King’s address at the time as RFD#2, Kansas Road, Bridgton, Maine 04009. There are six pages of manuscript, and a total in King’s own note of approximately 3900 words. Another note on the folder says “Missing Pages” and the story most certainly ends in the middle of a paragraph.
 

King told Douglas Winter
⁴⁵
about his sending science fiction stories to
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
:  

One of the few good ones was about an asteroid miner who discovered a pink cube, and all this stuff started to come out of the cube and drive him back further and further into his little space hut, breaching the airlocks one after another. All the science fiction magazines sent it back, because they knew goddam well there was no science in it … There was just this big pink thing that was going to eat someone, and it ate him.  

If this is the same story, King’s memory seems a little faulty (see below) but at least he hints at the ending. 

In this New Worlds tale, while wildcat mining for copper on Asteroid 419C (that is, 419C for “Charlie”) Carl Willys found some incredibly valuable pink cubes. Before he could leave the asteroid an alien creature attacked and trapped him in his Hut. He named the creature Charlie, presumably after the asteroid itself, and fought it for four months, including using an oxy-acetylene torch to burn it. Charlie finally broke the airlock door and readers last see Willys becoming ever more desperate as Charlie covers the entire Hut. 

Carl Willys was an old man and a wildcatter so this find would appear to have been his last chance at riches, but he has apparently become inescapably trapped. Other miners had done well by selling the pink cubes
–
Ben Dauphine found good deposits of the pink cubes on Asteroid 1004D and made $4 million selling them and Frank Jamieson also found the cubes on Asteroid 731A and made $1 million. 

All we know of Charlie is that it is very big and, while it looks like black jelly, red flashes are visible through its nerve system or synapses. 

It is a real shame the manuscript ends in mid-paragraph. While it is far from King’s most interesting story and science fiction is not King’s greatest strength, it would have been interesting to understand the direction the story would take next. Will Willys escape somehow? Will he be driven insane? Why does “Charlie” want the pink cubes, for instance are they the “eggs” of its species? Does Charlie want them at all, or is it just attacking an alien intruder? Will there be a supernatural or other horror intervention? Or did Charlie just eat Willys, as King told Winter?  

It seems unlikely King will ever revitalise and publish this unfinished story. 

King and Science Fiction 

King has written only a small number of purely science fiction stories and most critics suggest these are not the best of his works. King may agree, as he has not allowed many of his shorter science fiction works to be published. Clearly influenced by the lurid tales he read as a boy and young man they often tend contain relatively unsophisticated science. In the case of one,
The Jaunt
, King agreed his original science was “wonky.” However, there are many other stories with a science fiction angle or connection and these tend to be the more satisfying tales. 

The following stories represent King’s science fiction output, or stories with a significant science fiction component. It should be noted that some of these stories may actually represent a connection with
The Dark Tower
cycle, which is generally recognized as fantasy. Such definitions are fluid and the list below represents the authors’ opinion. 

The Aftermath Battleground 

Beachworld Cell 

Charlie Code Name: Mousetrap  

Crouch End The Dead Zone  

Donovan’s Brain Dreamcatcher  

The End of the Whole Mess Everything’s Eventual  

Firestarter From a Buick 8  

Golden Years Graduation Afternoon 

Home Delivery The Hotel at the End of the Road 

The House on Maple Street I am the Doorway  

I Know What You Need I’ve Got to Get Away/ The Killer 

I Was a Teenage Grave-Robber/ In a Half-World of Terror 

The Jaunt The Langoliers 

The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill/ Weeds The Mist 

Mobius Night Surf 

The Regulators/ The Shotgunners The Reploids 

The Revelations of ‘Becka Paulson The Running Man 

The Stand The Sun Dog 

They Bite The Tommyknockers 

Trucks Under the Dome 

Ur 

⁴⁵
Stephen King: The Art of Darkness
, Douglas E. Winter, p.18
 

Children of the Corn – Unproduced Screenplay (c.1978) 

Children of the Corn
was originally published in
Penthouse
for March 1977. King rewrote it for its appearance in the 1978 collection
Night Shift
, that rewrite mostly involved cosmetic wording changes although there are specific factual changes. In addition, King wrote a screenplay of the tale. In total, this means King has created three versions of this one tale. 

One of his most original stories,
Children of the Corn
has twice been produced as a film and has spawned more “adaptations” than any other of his works. Most, though, are barely connected and that only by the use of the title (
see feature panel
). 

The first adaptation was the 1983 short film,
Disciples of the Crow
. It is best described as a very ordinary movie. It can be seen as one of two movies on the videocassette
Two Features from Stephen King’s Night Shift Collection
(1991); or on
A Trilogy from Stephen King’s Nightshift Collection
. The screenwriter and director for this version was John Woodward; Eleese Lester played Vicky and Gabriel Folse portrayed Burt. 

The much better known film version is 1984’s
Children of the Corn
, which is widely regarded as one of the worst King adaptations ever! It was the first feature movie made from a King short story. Fritz Kiersch directed, Peter Horton played Burt Stanton and
Terminator
co-star Linda Hamilton portrayed Vicky. John Franklin appeared as Isaac. Also known
as
Stephen King’s Children of the Corn
,
it is available on DVD. 

The screenplay for the movie was credited to George Goldsmith. In fact, King wrote a screenplay on which Goldsmith’s was allegedly based. King was denied a writer’s credit by The Writer’s Guild of America and, after the movie flopped, was glad of it. He even told
Cinefantastique
magazine, “The picture was a dog.” In the September 1985 issue of
Castle Rock
King gave his opinion in an article titled
Lists That Matter (Number 8)
. In this piece he lists his ten worst movies of all time. At number six is
Children of the Corn
: 

Here is another horror movie, and to me the most horrible thing about it is that it was based on one of my stories. Not very closely – just closely enough so the producers could call it
Stephen King’s Children of the Corn
, which it really wasn’t. In the movie version, the creature appears to be some sort of gopher from hell. There are some classic bad lines in this movie. “Outlander, we have your woman!” is one I like; later on the hero scooches down beside the little kid and says in a friendly voice, “Just what did this monster look like, Jobie?” I understand this gobbler made money, but so far I haven’t seen any of it, and I’m not sure I want to. It might have corn-borers in it.  

King’s second draft screenplay is summarized in this chapter. It appears to have been written about 1978 as, in an interview with David Chute (published in
Take One
for January 1979 and later reproduced in
Feast of Fear
⁴⁶
), King comments that he had written a screenplay of this story, “not because I thought a movie would come of it but because I needed some practice.” 

The basic storyline of this America Under Siege story is well known to King fans but in this version King makes a number of significant changes, which are summarized later. 

In the tale two travelers are sacrificed to a savage god. In about September of 1968 a bizarre cult of children sprang up in the town of Gatlin, Nebraska. The children slaughtered the thousands of adults in the town and began to worship a creature they called He Who Walks Behind the Rows. This evil entity was old when Jesus was “unborn,” according to Isaac, one of the Children. It was huge, with a shifting manta shaped outline, huge green eyes and a hell-fire red mouth.  

In 1980 one of the children tried to escape Gatlin. However, eleven year old Joseph was caught in the corn by the other Children, his throat was slit, and he was pushed into the road where he was run down by a Thunderbird. In shock, Burt Stanton, the car’s driver and his wife Vicky stopped and picked up the body. Fatefully, they then decided to drive into Gatlin to report the accident.  

Burt Stanton had served at least three years in the Special Forces of the US Marines in Vietnam, returning from 61 patrols, winning the Congressional Medal of Honor and holding the rank of Captain. He and Vicky, residents of Boston, had been married for six years but they were facing marital problems at the time they drove into Nebraska. Vicky was beautiful, with long hair and a “dynamite” body and had been the Prom Queen. 

The Stantons arrived in the apparently abandoned town but quickly realized something was wrong
–
for instance, there were skeletons on the roof of the Town Hall! In the Bureau of Registrations there was a gigantic portrait of a vulpine Christ-like being with corn hair.  

Suddenly, vicious Children appeared and surrounded the couple. The Children quickly captured and killed Vicky and left her crucified body in the cornfields as a sacrifice to their “god.” After initially escaping the mob, Burt headed into the cornfields where he found himself at dawn in a clearing in which his wife’s body and the crucified skeleton of the town’s police chief had been left. The Children called this place “the clearing of the Blue Man,” a reference to the dead cop’s uniform.  

He Who Walks Behind the Rows then killed Burt. Until this point all Children over the age of 18 (the so-called “Age of Favor”) had walked into the corn to their fate at the hands of the creature. To appease He Who Walks Behind the Rows after the incident with the Stantons the group’s “Seer,” Isaac immediately reduced the Age of Favor to 17 and a group of more than twelve boys and girls were required to walk into the corn. 

In updating the storyline from the two versions of the short story to the screenplay King made a number of very important changes. Burt and Vicky Robeson become Burt and Vicky Stanton. The date of the initial killings and takeover of the town by the creature and its disciples moves from about August 1964 to about August 1968; and the arrival of the Stantons to July 1980 from the original July 1976 for the Robesons (maintaining the twelve year gap). 

Norman Staunton, the 7-year-old preacher from Vicky Robeson’s childhood becomes Norman Stanton, from Vicky Stanton’s childhood. Very strange indeed! The population of Gatlin varies from
Penthouse
(5431) to
Night Shift
(4531) to the Screenplay (5438). The Police Chief also acquires an ironic name: Samuel Cross. 

In the earlier versions the Children chased Burt into the corn, eventually driving him toward the sacrificial clearing. In the screenplay they were afraid to go into the corn and did not follow him until Isaac had given them clearance. He Who Walks Behind the Rows’ eye color changes from red to green. Originally Isaac reduced the Age of Favor from 19 to 18; in the screenplay he reduced it from 18 to 17. 

In the screenplay King also deliberately and specifically links
Children of the Corn
to a number of his other works. In Scene 16, Vicky tells Burt that the road forks ahead (the fork is at a point
after
Joseph was hit by their car). “One fork goes to a place called Gatlin, the other one goes to a place called Hemingford Home.” Hemingford Home, described as just a wide place in the road, was not mentioned in either version of the original short story. It is the town near which Abagail Freemantle lived nearly her entire life in
The Stand
. In the Original version of that classic novel the superflu hit in June 1980; in the Uncut version it struck in June 1990. In this script the Stantons arrived in Gatlin in July 1980 so this version cannot be in the original timeline of
The Stand
.  

Of particular interest is that in the
Complete and Uncut
version of
The Stand
(but not the original) Stu Redman dreamed of crucifixions along Highway 6 near Hemingford Home. Of course, there
were
crucifixions near Gatlin. King was clearly linking these stories when he updated
The Stand
. 

Hemingford Home, Nebraska is also mentioned in
It
(Benjamin Hanscom lived there between confrontations with Pennywise) and
The Last Rung on the Ladder
(Larry and Kitty grew up there). Gatlin, Nebraska is also mentioned in
It
, where it is described as a small
deserted
town on the road to Hemingford Home. 

While this script was not produced and it is most unlikely it will ever be published, its importance lies in revealing King’s intent for the film version (compared to the dreck that was actually produced); its renaming of characters and its deliberate linking to other King stories and locales. 

Children of the Corn – The “Sequels” 

A series of sequels to the 1984 movie
Children of the Corn
have been released. However, they have little more connection to the original short story than the name of the series. In the movie industry such sequels are known as a “franchise” and it never ceases to amaze that these movies, some of which are execrable, ever reached production let alone release! Not one of these movies even makes a 4 rating out of 10 at the world’s leading movie database,
www.imdb.com
. Key details of each production follow. 

Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice
(1993). Follows on from the events of the first film and released direct–to-video. IMDB rating: 3.7. Screenplay – A. L. Katz, Gilbert Adler and Bill Froehlich; Director – David F. Price. Actors – Terence Knox (John Garrett); Paul Scherrer (Danny Garrett); Ted Travelstead (Mordechai). DVD: 2000. 

Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest
(1994). Released direct-to-video. IMDB rating: 3.1. Screenplay – Dode B. Leveson; Director – James D. R. Hickox. Actors – Daniel Cerny (Eli); Ron Melendez (Joshua); John Clair (Malcolm). DVD: 2003. 

Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering
(1996). Made for video. IMDB rating: 3.7. Screenplay – Stephen Berger and Greg Spence; Director – Greg Spence. Actors – Naomi Watts – later an Academy Award nominee for
21 Grams
– (Grace Rhodes); Emmy award winner William Windom (Doc Larson); Karen Black – also an Oscar nominee – (Julie Rhodes). DVD: 2003. 

Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror
(1998). Released direct-to-video. IMDB rating: 3.6. Director and Scriptwriter – Ethan Wiley. Actors – Stacey Galina (Alison); Alexis Arquette (Greg); Eva Mendes (Kir); Fred Williamson (Sheriff Skaggs); David Carradine (Luke Enright). DVD: 2001. 

Children of the Corn 666: Isaac’s Return
(1999). Released direct-to-video and set back in Gatlin. IMDB rating: 3.2. Screenplay – Tim Sulka and John Franklin; Director – Kari Skogland. Actors – John Franklin (Isaac); Nancy Allen (Rachel Colby); Golden Globe winner Stacey Keach (Dr. Michaels); Natalie Ramsely (Hannah). DVD: 1999. 

Children of the Corn: Revelation
(2001). Released direct-to-video. IMDB rating: 3.1. Screenplay – S. J. Smith; Director – Guy Magar. Actors – Claudette Mink (Jamie Lowell); Kyle Cassie (Armbrister); Michael Ironside (Priest). DVD: 2001. 

A new television adaptation was released in 2009, titled
Children of the Corn
(or
Stephen King’s Children of the Corn
). Yet another flop, directed and written by Donald P. Borchers, it starred David Anders (Burt Stanton), Kandyse McClure (Vicky), Daniel Newman (Malachai) and Preston Bailey (Isaac). A DVD was released in 2009.