Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror(1998)

Submitted by Tornado Dragon

SHORT VERSION:
Come time for Jacob to sacrifice himself to He-Who-Walks-Behind-the-Rows (HWWBR), who appears as a green fire inside the corn silo on Luke Enright’s farm, Jacob tells Ezekiel that he won’t go through with it and that he is leaving the farm. He then tries to get his pregnant wife, Lily, to come along with him, but she refuses. However, a few teenage cultists stop him from leaving and tie him up in the barn, and he is stabbed and mortally wounded by Ezekiel soon after, both for challenging his authority and for committing heresy against HWWBR.

Just then, Jacob’s sister, Alison, appears with Sheriff Skaggs, his deputies, and the fire department to arrest Luke, end the cult, get Jacob out, and put out the fire in the silo. However, the cult members and HWWBR take out the deputies and firefighters, and when Skaggs attempts to arrest Luke, Ezekiel telekinetically makes Luke’s head split in half and then makes flames shoot out of his neck that burn Skaggs to death. Ezekiel tells Alison that Luke actually died years ago and that HE is the true leader of the cult, but she escapes him moments later. She runs outside and comes under attack from some of the teenage cult members, but she is rescued by her friends Greg and Tyrus, who have just arrived, and they all run into the barn to escape the cult members and barricade themselves in it.

Alison finds Jacob, and before he dies, they give each other their love, and he tells Alison that there is still time to stop Ezekiel and that there is something in the storage shed that can help her with this. As Greg and Tyrus get killed by some of the teenage cultists (though they take out the cultists in the process), Alison goes into the shed and finds several bags of fertilizer in there, so she takes two bags of it and bundles them up in a tarp along with a can of gasoline, intending to send it all down into the silo to extinguish the flames and thus destroy HWWBR.

As she climbs up the silo’s ladder with the bundle, Ezekiel and the rest of the cult come out to perform a mass suicide to HWWBR, since Ezekiel now believes that the cult has been irreparably ruined after what has happened tonight. He spots Alison while she is making her ascent, so he quickly follows her up there and attacks her before she can drop the bundle in. After a brief struggle, Alison overpowers Ezekiel and sends him into the silo to a fiery demise, and she then throws the bundle down after him and puts out the green fire. Once she gets back on the ground, she leads Lily and the rest of the surviving children away from the farm.

Sometime later, Lily gives birth to a son, and she and her parents arrange for Alison to adopt him because she is too young to be taking care of a baby right now. However, as Alison sings to her nephew, green flames appear in his eyes, a sign that he is possessed by HWWBR.

LONG VERSION:
While staying at a deserted farmhouse for the night (which was deserted because, the night before, the corn cult killed the husband and wife who lived in it) with their friends Tyrus (Greg Vaughan) and Kir (Eva Mendes), Alison (Stacy Galina) and Greg (Alexis Arquette) find the bodies of their friends Charlotte (Angela Jones) and Lazlo (Ahmet Zappa) in the cornfield, having been killed by the cult earlier that day. They call for help, which brings Sheriff Skaggs (Fred Williamson) and one of his deputies over to the house, and after he and the deputy bag the bodies, Skaggs orders the quartet of friends to get on the next bus out of Divinity Falls at 8 a.m. later that morning. However, come time when the group are supposed to leave, Alison tells the others that she is staying because she needs to find out if her brother, Jacob (Davino Buzzotta), is indeed with the cult, who reside at Luke Enright’s (David Carradine) farm nearby. The others decide to go with her.

As the quartet make their way to Luke’s house through his cornfield, they are stopped by Luke’s supposed lieutenant, Ezekiel (Adam Wylie), and two teenage cult members. Alison tells Ezekiel that she wants to talk to Jacob, but Ezekiel initially refuses her request, telling her that Jacob doesn’t want to see her. However, after she threatens to bring the police here, Ezekiel changes his mind and has her and her friends follow him to the house. He lets Alison go inside with him while the others are forced to stay outside, and after she first meets and speaks with Luke and gets his permission to see Jacob, Ezekiel escorts her to where Jacob is. Meanwhile, Kir wanders away from the others and comes across Zane (Aaron Jackson), one of the other cult members, and they strike up a conversation that causes Kir to start falling under the influence of He-Who-Walks-Behind-the-Rows (HWWBR).

Alison meets with Jacob in a room where he is reading the cult’s bible, and while Ezekiel waits outside, she tells Jacob that she is here to take him home. However, he refuses to come with her, both because he is angry with her for leaving him with their abusive drunken father (she ran away from home some years ago in order to get away from their father, but their father got even worse after she left, and Jacob took the brunt of it until he himself ran away at 14 to join the cult) and because he is now married to Lily (Olivia Burnette), another cult member who was chosen by Luke to bear his (Jacob’s) child. When she asks him why everyone here is so young, he explains that children are still pure of heart and mind and have not yet been corrupted by the ways of the “outsiders,” but after you turn 18 and become an adult, you enter the “age of sin.” Alison reminds him that his 18th birthday is tomorrow and asks him if he really does want to stay here. However, before he can answer her, Ezekiel comes back in and tells Alison that she must leave now. As she is about to head out, Jacob stops her and tells her that he wants her to have his bible, claiming that it “will help her understand,” and he writes down a message about HWWBR on the first page. She then rejoins her friends, and they all make their way back to the farmhouse.

Shortly after arriving there, Tyrus tells the others that he is not going to stick around this town any longer. Greg and Kir agree to leave with him, but Alison decides to stay behind because she wants to figure out a way to get her brother out of the cult. Shortly after her friends have left, Alison takes a closer look at the message that Jacob wrote in his bible, and she notices that, after piecing together the first letters from the start of each new line of words, the word they form is “help.” Realizing that Jacob snuck this into the message because he really wants to be free of the cult, she starts to leave for Luke’s farm again to rescue him. Seconds later, she bumps into an arriving Sheriff Skaggs, and off-screen, she fills him in on Jacob’s situation. Sometime later, after Greg, Tyrus, and Kir try and fail to hitch a ride out of town, they decide to return to the house to help Alison out. However, Greg and Tyrus are unable to find her anywhere (since she already left with Skaggs), and when they go outside, they discover that Kir – who decided to wait outdoors while they went inside to look around – has also vanished. Tyrus immediately puts the blame for these two sudden disappearances on the cult, so he and Greg head back to Luke’s farm to find them.

Meanwhile, Ezekiel holds the annual ceremony for HWWBR at the base of the farm’s corn silo, and Jacob is slated to sacrifice himself to the corn god, who supposedly resides in the raging green fire inside the silo. However, Jacob can’t bring himself to do it, and he asks Lily to leave this place with him so they can raise their child on their own, but she refuses. Jacob thus starts to leave the farm by himself, but unfortunately for him, Ezekiel sends two larger teenagers after him. Not wanting to disappoint HWWBR, Ezekiel asks the congregation if anyone here is about to turn 18, and Kir suddenly appears and offers to sacrifice herself, having become fully corrupted after reading the bible. Ezekiel accepts her offer, and Kir climbs the ladder and jumps down into the silo and burns to death. Meanwhile, the teenagers that Ezekiel sent after Jacob catch up to him, and they proceed to beat him down before putting him in the barn and leaving him hanging by his arms above the ground.

Shortly after Kir’s demise, Ezekiel enters the barn with Zane to confront Jacob. After charging Jacob with challenging his authority and committing heresy against HWWBR, Ezekiel drives a knife into his abdomen, then tells him that his corpse will be used to keep the pests away from the cornfield. Just then, another teenager enters the barn and warns Ezekiel that the “outsiders” are coming, so before leaving the barn to tend to this new problem, Ezekiel orders Zane to take a now-apparently-unconscious Jacob out into the cornfield and cut his throat. However, when Zane hesitates over cutting Jacob down and following through with Ezekiel’s order, Jacob suddenly awakens and knocks Zane out with a big kick. He manages to get down to the floor and pulls the knife out of his gut, but he is so weakened from the attack that he passes out.

Just then, Alison and Sheriff Skaggs show up at the farmhouse, and the latter is armed with a warrant to search the premises. They have also brought along a bunch of cops to aid in the search, as well as the fire department to put out the fire in the corn silo. Alison and Skaggs go inside, and after Skaggs shoves Ezekiel aside when he steps in his way, he walks up to Luke and tells him that he is here to arrest him. Luke responds by warning him that, if he tries to extinguish the fire in the silo, his men will be severely punished by HWWBR. Moments later, two firefighters are incinerated by the silo’s flames. Skaggs forces Luke up to his feet, but suddenly, Ezekiel telekinetically makes Luke’s head split in half, and then flames shoot out of his neck and onto Skaggs, burning him to death. Ezekiel informs Alison that Luke has actually been dead for years, and Alison quickly picks up Skaggs’ shotgun and aims it at him. Ezekiel admits to her that HE is the true leader of the cult, but before he can do anything to Allison, he gets distracted by a sudden explosion emitting from the silo, giving Alison a chance to escape outside. By this point, the teenage cult members have started to kill the cops, but Alison shoots and kills one of them once she gets out onto the front porch. She then comes under attack from another, but Greg appears and knocks out her attacker. He and Alison then run up to Tyrus after he has finished looking inside one of the police cruisers for the keys to it, but he informs them that he couldn’t find any keys. Seconds later, the other teenage cultists appear and chase after them, and they run through the cornfield and into the barn and barricade the door.

Alison finds Jacob soon after, and she orders the others to make sure that all of the barn’s doors are locked while she tends to him. She tearfully tells Jacob that what has happened to him is all her fault, but Jacob regains consciousness and replies that it isn’t. He then tells her about how he remembers all the times that she protected him from their father while they were growing up, and he explains that he thought that, by coming to this farm, he could make a fresh start and keep himself from becoming like their father. Also, he informs her that he is about to become a father himself. He soon tells her that there is still time to stop Ezekiel; she must fight fire with fire, and there is something in the storage shed that can help her with this. However, the last of his strength leaves him before he can tell her what is in there, and after he and Alison give each other their love, he dies. Around this time, Greg and Tyrus find Charlotte’s car in another part of the barn, and as they try to start it up, Alison enters the shed and finds bags of fertilizer in there. Just then, Zane and two other cultists break in and try to kill Alison, Greg, and Tyrus, and when all is said and done, Alison winds up as the sole survivor of the attack. Alison then gets a tarp and puts a full can of gasoline and two bags of fertilizer into it, then bundles it all up and takes it towards the corn silo.

Ezekiel meets with all of the surviving cult members and tells them that they must now perform a mass suicide to HWWBR, believing that they need to join him in a “better place” because of the loss of their cult’s stability and their need to do this before – as he believes – the last innocent souls on Earth have been annihilated. However, when they arrive at the silo, Ezekiel spots Alison heading up the ladder with her bundle, so he quickly climbs up after her and stops her before she can drop it in. The two of them then struggle with each other until Alison manages to overpower him and send him down into the silo to a fiery demise, and she drops the bundle in after him moments later and extinguishes the flames. When she gets back down on the ground, she is met by Lily and the rest of the cult, and when Lily asks her if Ezekiel has joined HWWBR, she replies that he may have. Then, one of the young girls asks Alison if they will get to go where Ezekiel went, but she tells her that it is not her time yet. She then leads Lily and all the other children away from the farm.

Months later, after Lily has given birth to her and Jacob’s son, Alison visits Lily at her parents’ house and meets her new nephew. Lily’s mother remarks that Lily is not ready to take care of a baby at her age, indicating that Alison has decided to adopt the child, and Lily agrees with this decision, believing that this is what Jacob would’ve wanted. However, as Alison sings to her nephew, the camera focuses on his eyes, and the green flames from the corn silo show up in his pupils, a sign that HWWBR has taken possession of him.