INTRODUCTION
Hello, and welcome to The Monster & The Child, where childhood studies and monster studies collide! I am Dr. Kathleen Kellett, and today we are going to talk about how children can be made monsters through religion. So not to get too controversial or anything! We’re going to be discussing two films today, both of which were Patreon poll winners. If you are interested in voting on future monster-and-child topics, consider clicking that link in the description. The films in question are Children of the Corn, the 1984 adaptation of the Stephen King short story, and Robert Eggers’s 2015 film The Witch. Both of these stories deal with (to varying degrees of success) the intersection of childhood, isolation, and religious extremism in a specifically American context, which is, unfortunately, all too relevant to discuss today.
Before we get into that, just a reminder that if you are interested in more monster education, I have programs that are open to enrollment! I have a teen program called Youth Monsterology, which is a five-month peer lit discussion and one-on-one educational mentorship experience. Participants will discuss monster literature and then use those themes to spearhead their own academic, creative, and/or activist projects within their local communities, with close guidance from an experienced educator, which is to say, me. I also have Teen and Adult Monster Book Clubs that you could sign up for at any time. We just had our first Adult Monster Book Club meeting, and the next one will be on August 26th, where we’ll be discussing Eden Robinson’s Son of a Trickster. I would love to see you there!
Also, as you can tell, this is a new space. I have just moved. Just like in my last video, this is a ruse. Everything else in this room is not set up, and this is barely set up, either. So I apologize if the sound is weird, if the lighting is weird. There’s a lot of glare off of my glasses, which is hopefully only going to annoy me and not anyone else. I am not yet finished setting up how filming in this space is going to work. But I am officially moved, so that is one major stress of the summer down!
All right, so back to our religiously troubled monster children. Probably wise to get some disclaimers out of the way first. I am not at all anti-religion on the whole. If we look at human culture and history, religion and spirituality are ubiquitous, and they are extremely meaningful aspects of literally billions of people’s lives. I have known and loved people who would describe themselves as “religious” and who adhere to a variety of faiths whose lives have been undeniably enriched by their religious practices. I myself was raised Catholic, and until I was around fourteen or fifteen, I would have described myself as “religious,” as well, and that childhood religiosity for me was more positive than negative. Also, nothing like happened at fourteen or fifteen to make me not religious anymore; my beliefs just began to change, and I eventually wound up in the contentedly agnostic place that I am now.
However. Religious institutions are institutions of power – and historically, they are some of the most powerful ones, at that. Therefore, they are in the business of determining who has access to power and how. In other words, who is empowered and who is disempowered. Any guesses as to where children often wind up in that equation?
Is it possible to separate the positive from the negative cultural effects of religion? Not really, because a lot of times, these hierarchies of power wind up baked into theology itself. Of course, since I am not anti-religion in general, I believe that many people try and can succeed at moving the needle in a more positive direction. But while there is no such thing as a static religion, because there is no such thing as a static culture, injustices embedded within religious systems can be among the most intractable.
For the purposes of The Monster & The Child, the negative impacts of religious institutions and systems are often central to defining both monstrosity and childhood – and the spaces where they overlap. This subject is enormous, and obviously we’re not going to cover everything with a discussion of two movies. But Children of the Corn and The Witch raise a question that, to me, is of vital significance: when people are raised since birth within a harmful religious system, where can we draw the line – if we even can at all – between victim and monster?
AND A CHILD SHALL LEAD THEM: KIDS AS FANATICS
We should probably get this out of the way right now: Children of the Corn is not a good movie. It spins ninety minutes out of a short story that already doesn’t really have ninety minutes worth of plot, and also strips away a lot of the actually interesting themes from that brief source material. As Debaditya Mukhopadhyay notes in “The Children as Nemesis: A Reading of Stephen King’s ‘Children of the Corn’ and Its Adaptations,” the original has explicit environmental themes that the film entirely dispenses with, so instead of a dark tale of agricultural crisis and failed futurity and the children who are set to inherit the embattled American Midwest, it’s just kind of randomly about a malignant corn deity who has no particular reason for choosing children as his followers. Beyond that, the two adult main characters, Burt and Vicky, are considerably more heroic in the film than in the source material – especially Burt. Now, I still think that Burt kind of sucks in the movie, but he’s positioned as an ultimately good moral character in a way that he is not in the short story. So what we’re left with is a weirdly slow and plodding movie with some of the worst special effects you ever did see – and 1984 is no excuse, there are plenty of cool VFX from the 80s. What has elevated it to a bit of a cult classic is the fully committed villain performances from John Franklin as Isaac and Courtney Gains as Malachai, our two most dangerous children of the aforementioned corn. So kudos to them for saving my viewing experience.
Ultimately, this is a movie without a lot of there there, but the one thematic jumping-off point that is left is the issue of childhood religious fanaticism. So let’s dive into how that plays out in the unfortunate town of Gatlin, Nebraska. One normal small-town Sunday, little Job – deranged thing to name your child – is the only kid in church. His sister is home sick with a psychic fever, as one frequently is in Stephen King stories, and so he goes alone with his dad to the local diner. Isaac shows up in his creepy black hat outside the diner and nods to the other youths inside, who proceed to murder all the adults. This happened everywhere in town that day, while little psychic Sarah drew pictures of the slaughter bearing the legend “and a child shall lead them.” This is a quote from the Book of Isaiah, describing a utopian Messianic age in which the lion will famously lie down with the lamb. The “them” that the child will lead is, in fact, the animals, so the full picture is that of harmony and lack of danger. However, the quote is frequently taken out of context to imply that a child will lead adults or the faithful or whatever. In this case, a child is leading the other children to establish their own religious order on behalf of He Who Walks Behind The Rows, the deity who resides within the endless miles of cornfields and demands sacrifice.
Isaac, who is the conduit of this presence, rules his community of children with an iron fist, assisted by his main enforcer, Malachai. When a dissident child, Joseph, tries to escape and find help, the faithful kids slit his throat in the corn. He staggers out into the road and is promptly run over by Burt and Vicky, who are road tripping to Burt’s first assignment as a freshly graduated medical doctor. They are squabbling about Burt’s unwillingness to propose but are otherwise a relatively happy couple, and they laugh together when they try to find music on the radio out here in the middle of nowhere but instead find a fiery sermon. The preacher howls out, “But there’s no room for the fornicator! No room for the homosexual! No room for the drug abuser!” Burt continues to riff, “But there’s no room for the college graduate! No room for people who watch public television!” Vicky adds, “No room for commitment!”, which, get him, Vicky. On the whole, these two city-folk find this rural small-mindedness amusing, but they’re about to really not.
Enter Joseph, he gets hit, Burt goes out to administer first aid, but it’s too late – this kid has already been murdered, and not by a car. Upon this realization, Burt and Vicky load Joseph up into their trunk and try to find civilization to report the crime. A grizzled old gas station attendant, staple of the genre, tries to steer them away from Gatlin, but all roads literally lead there, and soon the cult of children are aware that there are “outlanders” in their midst.
As dictated by Isaac, the Gatlin children’s lives entirely revolve around their worship of He Who Walks Behind The Rows. They are not allowed back in their old houses, nor are they allowed to play or listen to music. All of them are dressed in old-fashioned, almost Amish-looking clothing, and their duties seem to be a) tend the corn, b) enforce compliance among their ranks, c) extort and threaten fuel out of the gas station guy (again, so much for the environmental themes), and d) perform rituals. These rituals, naturally, include human sacrifice. Whenever anyone reaches their nineteenth birthday, they are given to He Who Walks Behind The Rows (but only after the rest of the kids drink a little of their blood, too). They hold their ceremonies in the old church, though they’ve defaced all the Christian images. Also, they have fully crucified a cop. The most devout kids (so, Isaac, Malachai, and a girl named Rachel) speak in King James Bible-esque archaic grammar. Isaac, as the one who speaks directly with He Who Walks Behind The Rows, is the leader, but Malachai winds up challenging him because he does not believe that Isaac is extreme and violent enough. Malachai wants to wipe out all the nonbelievers, regardless of whether they can be useful to the children’s cult.
So this is what Burt and Vicky get caught up in. They find little psychic Sarah, and later the Good Child Jobie. The film balks at the horror of making all the kids bad, which, cowards. Meanwhile, Malachai is completing his schism, and he raises a corn cross with Isaac upon it, who winds up consumed by … pixels? I honestly don’t know what this effect is meant to convey, it’s so bad, but the cross then shoots off like a rocket, so, okay.
Burt, as the morally correct adult, arrives on the scene to scold all the kids: “Is this how it was with your parents, huh? Was it? Just because some self-proclaimed holy man said this is what God commands? What kind of a God tells a child to kill his parents, huh? Answer me that, buddy? Did you hear that before Isaac? Did you? I can’t believe you’re this blind. Maybe you’ve been listening to these holy rollers so long it’s all started to sound the same. Well, it’s not! Any religion without love and compassion is false!”
So that’s all incredibly unsubtle. Many of the kids seem to start second-guessing their convictions as the conflict among Malachai, Isaac, and He Who Walks Behind The Rows escalates. Isaac, singed and now fully possessed by the deity, kills Malachai, and a huge storm begins, threatening everyone’s lives. Burt, assisted by Jobie, douses the field in fuel and sets it ablaze, which seems to destroy He Who Walks Behind The Rows and also not start an out-of-control fire that anyone needs to like put out or anything like that. Burt and Vicky may or may not adopt Jobie and Sarah, and then the end.
Okay, so from Burt’s speech, it’s clear what this movie wants its thesis statement to be. The kids of Gatlin were raised in an environment of religious fire and brimstone, with rhetoric like the radio preacher ranting against the unworthy forming their spiritual worldview. This made them vulnerable to the machinations of He Who Walks Behind The Rows, an evil supernatural entity who got them to do its bidding by confirming their lifelong biases that religion is about power, exclusion, and martyrdom. Since this is not a good movie, we don’t get any of that actually shown in the first scene when the adults of Gatlin were still alive. Instead, their previous existence looks pretty small-town idyllic, with everyone heading over to the local diner for coffee and milkshakes after church. So my analysis is going less off the actual scenes and text of the film than it is the implications that the film fails to support, but those implications are actually what are interesting. Sometimes bad storytelling still provides a good springboard for the stories that could have been told.
In “The Global Village of the Damned: A Counter-Narrative for the Post-War Child,” Steven Bruhm shouts out Children of the Corn as an example of children in horror who are “as likely to sterilize, poison, or explosively decimate the future as they are to ensure it” (157). (This article, as the title would imply, is primarily about Village of the Damned, another Patreon poll winner that I’ll be making a video on in the future.) Bruhm notes that in historical moments that are preoccupied with what “the future” even means – and whether it will be drastically different from the present and the past – this type of anti-future-oriented horror child is a particularly common and frightening figure in the monster stories that play out our collective anxieties. This film fits that bill, as it is a Cold War movie, and it features a bunker that Jobie’s father built to protect against the communists – who Burt notes dryly did not wind up being the biggest issue in Gatlin. In the 1980s, amid this high cultural anxiety about the future, there was a huge wave of American Christian conservatism. Now, that ball had started rolling well earlier in the 20th century, as W. Scott Poole discusses in Satan in America: The Devil We Know. As soon as the Cold War kicked off, American politicians like Joseph McCarthy were conflating the enemies of capitalism with the literal Christian devil (148-149). Since the literal Christian devil, at least in American conservative, evangelical, and charismatic theologies, is as evil as evil gets – the creator of evil, the source of all evil, capable only of evil for evil’s sake – he is, shall we say, a useful monster to invoke if you want to turn people against your enemies. As more social changes and upheavals take place over the decades of the twentieth century – the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, women’s liberation and Roe vs. Wade, and the gay rights movement, to name only a few – conservative resistance to change became more and more politically enmeshed with white American evangelical Christianity. After all, remember what I said in the intro about institutions of power. The political institutions were very obviously having their preexisting systems and hierarchies challenged. The very word “conservative” conveys an attitude that is resistant to that change, and partnering with other institutions, like religious ones, is really just a smart move. (And these institutions were never separate, make no mistake. White Southern Christian churches were instrumental in defending slavery before the Civil War. And after, honestly.) Ronald Reagan – pause here for everyone to shake their fist – really took the twentieth-century reins of marrying religious and political conservatism, leading to the major role of American evangelical Christianity in ensuring his presidency in the 1980s (168).
Not coincidentally, we also have the Satanic Panic in the 1980s, which I’ve mentioned on this channel a couple times before. This is not only reflected in the pop culture of the time, but unfortunately ruined many actual lives as people, like the owners of the McMartin preschool, were falsely accused of specifically targeting children in Satanic rituals. So that’s the context in which Children of the Corn was released. The twist in this narrative is that it’s not the adults preying on the kids. The kids come to their evil religion by themselves. Now, He Who Walks Behind The Rows is not Satan, per se; he’s a dark and malevolent agricultural deity who seems to exist outside of any kind of actual Christian cosmology. If the Christian God is a real entity within the world of this story, he never shows up. Only his representatives do, in the form of the fanatical radio preacher. The viewer is positioned to find this strain of religious conservatism, with the litany of enemies who are not allowed in the fold, to be a blight upon middle-American culture. It is what poisoned the minds of the children before He Who Walks Behind The Rows even got to them. It is what has cut the children off from ensuring the future, as of course we know children must do within our social constructs of childhood. They even explicitly cut off their own futures, sacrificing their lives at nineteen. So in this way, the film is resisting a lot of mainstream cultural messages from the 1980s, flipping the narrative so that the people screaming about evil all the time are the actual causes of evil.
This would be in keeping with Stephen King’s own stated beliefs about children, which is that they are “good, generally speaking. Unless they’ve been warped in some way” (47). However, Mukhopadhyay acknowledges that even in the short story, Children of the Corn doesn’t fully uphold that view due to the “binaries of child antagonists and adult protagonists” (47). The film flattens the implicit thematic critiques further by “its reluctance to associate [the children’s] fanaticism with environmental crisis and the portrayal of adults as faultless superiors” (54). Ultimately, Isaac, Malachai, and their followers are one-note hellions, your classic scary-because-they-aren’t-innocent horror kids without much more depth than that. But if we take seriously the implication that their orientation towards violence was directed by fanatical religion, then I think the obvious follow-up question is when, exactly, does a follower of an abusive religion stop becoming a victim and start becoming a perpetrator? Are all the Children of the Corn past that line? Isaac, Malachai, and Rachel are certainly portrayed very unsympathetically, but when the rest of the kids try to shelter from the storm, do they deserve salvation or are they now beyond it, in the eyes of the narrative – or the viewer?
In “Distorting Concepts, Obscured Experiences: Hermeneutical Injustice in Religious Trauma and Spiritual Violence,” Michelle Panchuk explains that knowledge – the processes of meaning-making about the world and our place in it – is highly dependent upon our place within our cultures: “The shape of our knowledge and our interpretation of our own experience are partially determined and constrained by our social situation” (610). Religion is, of course, a major aspect of one’s social situation, and because religions are explicitly concerned with the behaviors of its adherents, religious systems are particularly powerful in the establishment of normativity. One way that norms are established is through the specific terminology of the religion; an example that Panchuk gives is the concepts of “sinners” vs. “saints” (610). She explains, “These concepts serve as regulative ideals and are action-guiding for religious practitioners” (611). We can see through the faux-Biblical syntax that Isaac and his closest followers use that these kids are using language to establish the moral and behavioral norms of their new religion by modeling their speech off of the language of the religion that preceded them and that they were raised in. This language is not only part of the norm-making process itself, but it also works as a cultural shorthand to signal fanaticism to the audience. We know that people who talk like this are probably using that language to do violence, justified through religion. Panchuk explains, “certain theological commitments (for example, original sin, divine justice) can create an epistemic context in which particular instances of abuse cannot be recognized as abuse” (612). In other words, if harsh punishment is understood as “atonement” or suffering is understood as “sacrifice” within the norms of the religion itself, then practitioners of that religion may not have access to the conceptual frameworks that would allow them to view the harms that are being carried out as negative things. Case in point, Amos, the kid who’s turning nineteen, can’t wait to give his life for He Who Walks Behind The Rows.
So whose fault is this? The movie clearly indicts adults like the intolerant radio preacher for creating an environment in which children normalize religion as violence. But weren’t the adults in their community also raised in the same religious environment? At what point did they become at fault for recreating the powerful moral norms that they internalized as children? When they turned eighteen – or nineteen, I guess, according to the He Who Walks Behind The Rows system? Also, it’s worth pointing out that, within the context of this story, He Who Walks Behind The Rows is 100% real, and sacrifices to him seem to genuinely increase the corn growth and/or his power. So is it just the leadership of the harmful religious systems that are to blame, like the angry god or the angry preacher? The adults of Gatlin are framed entirely as victims – perhaps not just of their children, but of their religious knowledge system. But then Burt calls the kids “blind” for the way they follow He Who Walks Behind The Rows, who, again, is demonstrably real and also reinforces what they’ve already been taught about how religious power works. So children may be portrayed as particularly vulnerable to religious manipulation in this film, but they’re also still blamed for it if it works. What we wind up with is a self-righteous savvy adult with “correct” ideas about religious love and compassion telling off all the backwards kids and their backwards rural town, which is reductive and entirely unhelpful in any real-world context. Also, less importantly but still irritatingly, it makes for boring, shallow storytelling. But those questions that are raised – those are interesting, and relevant, and really difficult to answer.
Luckily for us, we have not stopped trying to address these questions through horror. Let’s turn now to a more complex film that addresses that blurry American Christian line between the monster and the child, and that takes us all the way back to the beginnings of American Christianity itself: Robert Eggers’s The Witch.
“CONCEIVED IN SIN AND BORN IN INIQUITY”: PURITAN MONSTER-CHILDREN
I have talked about Puritan theology and constructions of childhood before on this channel. While the construct of “childhood innocence” is ubiquitous today, the Puritans demonstrate that these beliefs that we take for granted are, in fact, products of culture – and they do so by having the exact opposite constructs. Puritans were Calvinist Protestants whose cultural presence was strongest in the 17th century in various parts of Western Europe and colonized parts of North America, particularly in what is now New England. They were foundational to the creation of what remains a major strain of American Christianity – and, indeed, they’re foundational to the creation of an “American” identity in general. Pilgrims, Thanksgiving, New World, “religious freedom,” etc. Except they were definitely a “religious freedom for me and not for thee” kind of community. Poole explains, “The Puritans grounded their conception of true religious faith in the need to struggle against the wiles of Satan” (13). Everything was pitched at the highest possible level of good vs. evil moral stakes. Consequently, Puritans are known for their extreme religious austerity and rigid moral codes, as well as their overall profoundly negative view of “human nature.” This view absolutely and even especially extended to childhood.
In my very first semester as a Childhood Studies graduate student, I was a teaching assistant for an American history course called “Youth in a New Nation” (shoutout to Dr. Susan Miller). This class started by essentially shocking its students with an approach to childhood that, through our modern eyes, feels frankly horrible. Puritans believed that all humans were born inherently full of sin, and that it was only being raised in a godly context that could even slightly improve you from that state. Therefore, childhood – and infancy in particular – was the most morally debased period of the human life course. It was the role of adults in the community, particularly parents, to break the sinful will of the child so that they might become a less sinful adult. Some of these attitudes were expressed in ways that, again to modern people, seem bizarre. For instance, Puritans did not want their babies to crawl, because that was something that beasts did. Their entire cosmology depended on “man” being the closest creation to God – still wildly far away, but the pinnacle of nature, at least, and the only creation capable of logic and reason enough to worship God. Babies really throw a wrench into this idea, because they aren’t exactly known for their logic and reason. All the things that the Puritans perceived as outwardly separating us from the animals, like walking and talking, fall apart when we look at the youngest members of our species. So Puritans tried to get their babies to start walking as fast as possible, while bypassing crawling entirely. In Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600-1900 – a chapter of which was the first thing on Dr. Miller’s syllabus – Karin Calvert explains how Puritans would put their babies in standing stools that are kind of similar to today’s baby walkers, but they crucially lack any seat for the baby to rest in. They’d just be stuck standing for as long as they were left in there. Couple this with the fairly obvious punitive practices that come from raising a child in a way that “breaks their will,” and we’re left with a version of childhood that, to most people living today, sounds like a nightmare.
But Dr. Miller wouldn’t allow her students to linger in that feeling of horrified judgment – or at least not comfortably. While our beliefs about childhood are socially constructed, caring about what happens to your kids is not. That’s one of the very few universals, not just for humans, but for like most mammals, at least. So the Puritans did not treat their children harshly because they uniquely enjoyed tormenting them. They were genuinely extremely invested in raising children who could find favor in their God’s eyes – and who could therefore avoid everlasting hell, which was an extremely real threat in their belief system. They believed their children were inherently sinful, but that didn’t mean they didn’t love them. But, as Panchuk points out, “prejudices against children are sometimes compounded by theology” (615). She specifically calls out the belief in the necessity of breaking a child’s will as one of these instances. Love and prejudice are not mutually exclusive, perhaps especially when it comes to adultist systems.
I think that The Witch does a really good job of portraying the genuine extreme harms of a religious belief system that essentially requires child abuse through a family where those abused children are also genuinely loved. And now I’m feeling the need to throw in some disclaimers again. We have absolutely no obligation to forgive, let alone excuse, any abuse, regardless of how subjectively good the intentions of the abusers may be. And as you’ll see, The Witch does not do either of those things. As Amira McGivney points out in “The Roots of Corruption in The Witch,” “The empathy in portraying Puritan characters is met by the callousness in bringing disillusion to their calling.” Both are necessary, I think, to understand the religious contexts in which abuse can flourish despite good intentions.
The Witch begins with the isolation of five unfortunate children, as they are banished alongside their parents from their Puritan community. The reason for the banishment is that the father, William, believes that the rest of the Puritans are too lenient in their religious practice, which, yikes! So his wife Katherine, his teenage daughter Thomasin, son Caleb, twins Mercy and Jonas, and baby Sam set off to make their home at the edge of the woods. William and Katherine at first seem pleased with their righteous path, but of course things immediately start going downhill from there.
We get a close-up of Thomasin’s face as she begins a typical day with prayer. She confesses, “I’ve been idle of my work, disobedient of my parents, neglectful of my prayer. I have in secret played upon thy Sabbath and broken every one of thy commandments in thought. All the desires of my own will, and not the Holy Spirit. I know I deserve all shame and misery in this life and everlasting hellfire. But I beg thee, for the sake of thy son, forgive me. Show me mercy. Show me thy light.” So that’s pretty intense for someone who is probably meant to be at most around fifteen years old. The spiritual stakes are enormously high for even the most minor lapse of obedience for children raised in this kind of religious environment.
Of course, the physical stakes are high out in rural New England, too. The family’s corn crop has failed due to some kind of blight, and winter is on its way. William mostly copes with this by chopping ridiculous amounts of firewood in an attempt to feel useful. We’re not doing so good, and that’s before baby Sam up and disappears. Thomasin is watching him and happily playing peekaboo, demonstrating that even within this fairly anti-child religion, children could still be loved and enjoyed. But then the last time she uncovers her face, he’s just gone. The family determines that he must have been taken by a wolf, incredibly quickly and silently. The viewer knows better. In a hovel in the woods, a naked old woman lays Sam down and holds a knife over him. We are meant to infer that the first part of his body that is attacked is one that I don’t think I can say in the context of talking about a baby without getting immediately kicked off YouTube. We then cut to the old woman mashing something together with her mortar and pestle, and then rubbing the bloody concoction all over herself and her wooden staff, which she then uses to take flight.
So I would be remiss not to at least mention blood libel at this point. I talk about this age-old conspiracy theory a lot more in my conspiracy theories video, fittingly enough, but for those who are unaware, “blood libel” is the name given to antisemitic fictions, originating in the Middle Ages, that accused Jewish people of kidnapping and killing Christian babies and children to use their blood in religious rites. The witches in this film are not Jewish – rather, they’re explicitly Satanic – but you can see where the stories overlap, and indeed, remain the same in modern day conspiracy theories like QAnon. It’s also worth noting, as I did when I talked about witches in Weapons, that the old hag witch is an age-old misogynistic construct. In “Why Do We Picture Witches as Old Women?”, Julia Martins explains that in Early Modern Europe (and its colonies), women past the age of fertility were “assumed to be jealous of younger women, wishing to harm them and their children.” Now that these women were past their time of socially sanctioned usefulness, their bodies were monstrosized and imagined as “life-taking, not life-giving.” So as much as the movie The Witch critiques the oppressive worldview of the harmful Puritan theology, which it ardently does, it still does present us with monsters that entirely conform to their religious and gendered fears. Eggers’s whole deal is historically situated monster stories, which I think is generally a pretty cool deal to have, but it does make you run into this issue of confirming and reproducing the fears of the society that you’re simultaneously trying to deconstruct.
The family is understandably thrown into turmoil with the disappearance of Sam. Katherine prays incessantly that God may “show me that thou are me father and I am thy child and that thou lovest me with that unchangeable love.” This is a rather devastating prayer for someone who has just lost her own child, and also an interesting prayer when we see how difficult being a child in this cultural context is. William takes Caleb out into the woods – against Katherine’s wishes and without her knowledge – to see if they’ve trapped any game, since they’re not going to live on that corn. While they’re out there, William calmly drills Caleb on his own debased nature. He praises Caleb’s recitation of religious doctrines such as “I was conceived in sin and born in iniquity” and “My corrupt nature is empty of grace, bent unto sin, only unto sin, and that continually.” Yet William is somehow surprised when Caleb then starts to anxiously inquire about Sam: was he born a sinner? Yes, William acknowledges. “Which wickedness has he done?” Caleb presses, and that William can’t answer. Caleb, now highly distressed, asks if Sam is in hell, and if he’d go to hell if he died: “I hold evil in me heart.” William protests, “You are quite youngly yet,” but we just went over why that doesn’t matter, theologically speaking, so Caleb is not comforted. Finally, William tells Caleb “I love thee marvelous well,” but that his or Sam’s or anyone’s salvation is only God’s call to make, so William cannot answer Caleb’s questions.
Needless to say, the tension is not eased. This is where I feel like that idea of hermeneutical injustice is once again an important way of thinking about spiritual abuse. Panchuk defines this term as what occurs “when the very nature of one’s experience is obscured from collective understanding as a result of unjust social structures” (607). So, as we talked about with Children of the Corn, abuse may not be conceptualized as abuse, because that conceptual framework isn’t available. I’d call total familial isolation and repeated insistence on inherent irredeemable sinfulness emotionally abusive, and Caleb is displaying the overwhelming anxiety that results from that trauma, but he lacks the ability to communicate that he has been harmed – and William lacks the ability to understand that he’s the one doing the harming. Which is not to let him off the hook. Panchuk explains that hermeneutical injustice works two ways. Victims of harm are deprived of knowledge to make sense of their experiences, and perpetrators of harm – those in positions of greater power within their communities, such as, for example, the family patriarch – reject knowledge that does not adhere to their preexisting frameworks. William refuses to take on board the notion that maybe his son would be better off if he weren’t terrified that his baby brother is in hell. If he were to acknowledge that, his whole life that he has brought his family into out here in the wilderness – and the authority that he claimed to do so – would collapse. William doesn’t do this refusal consciously – there’s no real point of denial if you know that you’re in denial – but this is the way in which he continues the hermeneutical injustice in which his children are mired.
Meanwhile, back at the farm, the twins, who are probably around five or six, skip around after the goat called “Black Phillip” reciting a rhyme that declares him “King of all.” They laugh when William returns and falls in goat dung. In “Lost without Breadcrumbs: Family, Scapegoating, and the Rationalization of Abuse in Robert Eggers’s The Witch,” Kerry A. Olivetti points out that, when it comes to actual devilry, these young kids are the most consistently not-innocent of the entire family – though you’d never know it from the parents’ unequal treatment of their children (242). Katherine blames Thomasin for the twins’ behavior, as she has been blaming her for just about everything since Sam went missing. Caleb doesn’t blame Thomasin – those two are still close, but Caleb has uncomfortably begun to notice Thomasin’s chest in an implied lustful way. He hasn’t done anything about this to her, which is good, and this element of the movie mostly just makes me feel really sad for both of them. It’s another effect of isolation and obsession with sin. McGivney explains, “Puritans situated the body as a corruptible device whose urges must be constrained within a religious order or else be condemned.” If you drill into kids’ minds that bodies are inherently dirty and bad, then they’re going to wind up with some warped thoughts and feelings on the subject when they head towards puberty, if not before.
The ironically named Mercy taunts Thomasin by claiming to be “the witch of the wood,” who she asserts is responsible for Sam’s disappearance. When Thomasin and Caleb tell her to stop, she says, “Black Phillip says I can do what I like.” I do think that for parents so obsessed with devilry and sin, William and Katherine really drop the ball as far as noticing that their twins are constantly chanting about the omnipotence of their goat. Thomasin retaliates at Mercy by saying that she herself is actually the witch. She scares her little sister by claiming, “When I sleep, my spirit slips away from my body and dances naked with the devil,” and she threatens, “I’ll vanish thee too if thou displeaseth me.” “Displeaseth” – very hard to say.
One thing that would specifically displeaseth Thomasin would be tattling, but honestly, Mercy doesn’t even really need to: Katherine already hates Thomasin enough. She blames her for the disappearance of her father’s silver cup, which we the audience, as well as Caleb, already know that William, in fact, has sold, but William does not cop to it, even when Katherine viciously asks, “Did a wolf vanish that, too?” That night, Katherine tells William that Thomasin is old enough to be sent away as a servant to another family – though, while she clearly wants Thomasin out of her sight, she is also trying to protect her from both physical and spiritual dangers. She believes that they’re all going to starve during the winter, and also that the unbaptized Samuel is in hell. Her four remaining children silently listen to her wail from their attic room.
Caleb and Thomasin go to the forbidden woods the next day, hoping to find game in the traps that might prevent their family from sending Thomasin away. A clearly evil hare shows up and spooks the horse, which throws Thomasin. Caleb chases after it and gets lost. Despite chanting prayers for protection, he happens upon the witch’s hut. This time, the woman who emerges is not old, but young and beautiful with a prominent bosom, which clearly catches Caleb’s eye, even as he is afraid. She bends down to kiss him, and then grabs his head with an incongruously old hand.
Thomasin comes to and is found, and then William has to admit everything to his wife: he took Caleb out into the woods to hunt, and he sold her silver cup, to boot. Despite the horror of Caleb’s disappearance, Thomasin briefly enjoys her mother’s favor again as she turns against her husband instead. This sort of family dynamic is not dependent on Puritanism, though it certainly doesn’t help, and it’s another subtly played depiction of how kids can react to very conditional love. It all falls apart again for her when Caleb returns to the farm, naked and raving. He screams about sin, seizes, and throws up an entire bloody apple. Katherine comes to the, at this point reasonable, conclusion that he is witched. The twins blame Thomasin, with Mercy recounting her threats. William refuses to believe that he has raised a witch and admonishes the twins to pray – but then they really freak out their parents when they say they can no longer remember the Lord’s prayer. The scene reaches its horrifying climax – and I do use that term kind of deliberately here – as Caleb gasps in ecstasy that he sees the Lord’s light and feels it upon his body. He dies in bliss.
No bliss for the rest of the family, though. William now does believe that Thomasin is a witch, but he’s, like, really sad about it. He tries to gently coax her to “tell the truth,” which Thomasin rightly rejects as utter hypocrisy coming from the guy who’s been hiding things from his wife at every turn. Thomasin also calls him a failure, which is what makes him finally explode and yell “bitch” at her. Thomasin blames Black Phillip, which, like, yeah, come on now, and says that he has bedeviled the twins, so William boards up all of his remaining kids into the goat pen. Puritan problem-solving. That night, though, William kneels outside and confesses his sinful pride to his God as he literally eats handfuls of dirt to demonstrate his humility. He begs for redemption for his children, who “cannot tame their natural evils.” I think this is a really well-done scene. William is a specific character – particularly self-righteous and proud, but also sincere in his love for his family. He is also completely grounded in his culture, his own upbringing, and because of that, he does not know what to do to actually help his kids. He has no recourse, no knowledge base, that would allow him to not make things worse. I don’t like William, and I do think that even within the context of his culture, he sucks for being so extreme that he completely isolates his family. But he is genuinely doing what he believes his religion requires of him, and his whole life falls apart because of that.
And because there is a literal witch. In the night, she appears within the goat hut, suckling directly from an udder. Meanwhile, the devil in the guise of Caleb and Sam appears to Katherine, but she is too distracted by the return of her children to sign his book. She thinks she is nursing Sam, but instead a raven pecks at her and makes her bleed. In the morning, the goat hut has collapsed, Thomasin is asleep on the ground, and the twins are gone. Black Phillip proceeds to attack William, knocking him into his towering pile of firewood, which collapses on him. So now only mother and eldest daughter are left. Katherine, with blood all down her front, attacks Thomasin, choking her and calling her a whore and a “proud slut” for allegedly seducing her father and brother. Thomasin sobs “I love you” over and over, and then bludgeons her mother to death in self-defense. And thus the Christian family is annihilated.
Panchuk writes, “Insofar as embracing misguided religious ideals is spiritually harmful, the whole community is spiritually harmed by skewed religious concepts” (620). It’s not only the children who suffer. Clearly, this is true of William and Katherine, who were miserable and terrified even as they were filled with self-righteousness. This across-the-board spiritual harm is made literal by their poetic deaths: they are destroyed by their own deeds and offspring. (This is also true in Children of the Corn, though the full impact of it is impeded by the less focused storytelling there.) Panchuk is careful not to position the suffering of the powerful in harmful religious communities over that of the most disempowered victims – again, frequently children – but it’s still important to note that no one truly wins in these scenarios. Everyone’s psyche – their spirit, if that is a meaningful term to you – is made smaller and darker and colder, until it all collapses in violence.
So at this point, there’s only one thing left to happen. Thomasin follows Black Phillip and she challenges him to speak to her. In response, a whispery male voice from off-screen asks, “What dost thou want?” Olivetti points out that, while Black Phillip and the witches have menaced the rest of Thomasin’s family, they never physically cause her harm. That has been her parents’ role (248). Instead, Black Phillip lays out some options for Thomasin: “Wouldst thou like the taste of butter? A pretty dress? Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?” To all of this, Thomasin answers, “Yes.” Now, those are the most famous lines in the film, but I don’t usually see people quote the last question after Thomasin says yes, which I think is especially significant: “Wouldst thou like to see the world?” What a clincher for an isolated, homesick teenager who has been stuck in an unforgiving landscape that she didn’t choose. Thomasin asks, “What will thou from me?” and the voice answers, in classic devilish fashion, “Remove thy shift.” Thomasin complies, and we can barely make out a well-dressed man move behind her. Thomasin does not know how to write her own name in the devil’s book, but he assures her, “I will guide thy hand.”
From there, Black Phillip (back in goat guise) and the naked Thomasin go to the woods, where a whole circle of naked women chant and writhe around a fire. How many of these witches were menacing the family? Or did it only take one? No matter: Thomasin is one of them now. With the rest of the witches, she begins to levitate. She laughs even as she cries. The child has become a new monster.
Panchuk writes that “The symptoms of religious trauma can create impairments to religious belief, affects, and practices within the religiously traumatized individual, which may, in turn, lead to beliefs or behaviors that are stigmatized (explicitly or implicitly) by the religious community” (610). That pretty clearly is what happens to Thomasin here. And the witches of this movie aren’t good. They do prey upon and kill Thomasin’s siblings. They’re not, like, empowered wise women who are bucking the oppressive norms of their society in a cool counter-cultural community-oriented way. (Besides, as Olivetti points out, with Black Phillip, they are still “under the influence of yet another numinous male figure” (252).) These witches are taking life that is not theirs to take for their own pleasure and gain. They’re monster-monsters. Thomasin, presumably, will cause the kind of suffering that she herself has endured. But isn’t that true of most people who are raised in systems of harm that they go on to perpetuate? Was William not once a child terrified of hell like Caleb? When did Thomasin become a monster – when she signed the devil’s book, or when her mother looked at her and saw only sin?
CONCLUSION
When I was very little – if I were to guess, maybe about five years old – I asked my mother why women couldn’t become Catholic priests. She told me that the excuse the Church gives is that priests are modeled after the twelve disciples, who were men – but, she explained, Jesus also had women followers, so really it’s a bad and unfair rule, and it should be changed. I could not be more grateful for that foundational moment in my spiritual life. One of my very earliest memories of religion is learning that the institution is not always right. Definitely not a given for many children, especially in Catholicism. The amount of mental and emotional protection this afforded me going forward is honestly incalculable, especially as someone given to rumination that easily could have become moral scrupulosity. So, thanks, Mom!
Today in many places, including the United States, religious institutions are at the forefront of political movements to restrict children’s knowledge. Our Puritan beginnings and our last half-century of consolidating the religious right have led us now to a place where American Christian nationalism is a major force to be reckoned with – ideologically, financially, and legislatively. As an example, Doug Wilson is a Christian nationalist leader whom Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth follows, and he openly envisions a theocratic future in which all queerness is illegal – for the protection of The Children, of course. A link to an interview with Uncloseted Media where Wilson lays this all out is in the works cited below. We can also look at organizations like The Education Association of Christian Homeschoolers and the Home School Legal Defense Association, which lobby against literally any regulation of homeschooling standards because those would infringe on parents’ rights to raise their children on only the religious knowledge that they see fit – actual education and learning be damned. William would have loved their child-isolating ways. So would He Who Walks Behind The Rows.
Panchuk explains that “children remain subject to a number of unjust power imbalances and consistently face barriers to contributing to the hermeneutical resources relevant to understanding and communicating about their own experiences” (615). If religion were to magically cease to exist right this instant, that would still be true. But religious institutions are often particularly adept at maintaining those power imbalances precisely because of the spiritual stakes of raising “good” children. It’s not just their lives we’re talking about, after all, but their afterlives. Who would want to risk that – especially those who themselves have been raised within these ideologies all their lives? The strangling of children’s access to knowledge to ensure that they grow into godly adults becomes a perfectly self-sustaining cycle. Anyone who can’t keep in their place, grinding along in that cycle, becomes a monster to the in-group. But those who do keep in their place and perpetuate the harm the institution requires and keeps feeding sin and blood to their vengeful lords – well, their monstrosity seems inevitable, too.
I don’t have an answer for the question of when the victim becomes a monster. I don’t think the movies we discussed do, either, though I certainly think The Witch grapples with the question more eloquently than Children of the Corn. There is no clear dividing line to be found. Prior victimhood does not cancel out later harm, but nor does the latter negate the former. Horror and tragedy are often the same thing.
I do know, however, that the antidote to all of this is access to knowledge. That is what actually protects children. Specifically, children need to be taught that more than one system of knowledge exists in the world and that we all have a right to explore them all, even if they disagree with the systems most entrenched in our families or close communities. This was the inoculation against fanaticism that my mom gave me when she modeled disagreeing with our own church. And thankfully, despite the efforts of people like Doug Wilson or organizations like the Home School Legal Defense Association, gatekeeping knowledge is a lot harder now than it was in the 1600s or even the 1980s. Online resources and communities along with media representation of multiple ways of living can make it possible for kids to see a world outside of the vicious cycle of oppressive religious systems. If they follow these alternate paths, they will still probably become monsters in the eyes of the people who raised them – a trauma and a tragedy every time – but they can at least break free of a future of perpetuating the same kind of harm.
This topic is dark and heavy, and luckily I have had a lovely commenter community over here, so I don’t think I need to tell you to be particularly respectful of one another for this one, because you surely already know. I am very interested in hearing your thoughts on religious monster stories like Children of the Corn and The Witch, and how we see childhood constructed within these tales. Don’t forget to like and share the video, and to subscribe to the channel so you never miss a monstrous conversation. My Patreon is below if you would like to vote on future topics like this one, as well as get access to additional reaction videos. I am now finished reading my YA manuscript, Our Sharp Forsaken Teeth – link to the playlist in the corner and below if you’d like to check that out – so now I have to come up with some new in-between-video-essays content, so stay tuned for whatever that turns out to be. Meanwhile, if you want more monster education in your life, don’t forget to check out themonsterandthechild.com/programs. Thanks again for tuning in, and I will see you soon for more monstrous food for thought.
Media discussed:
- Children of the Corn, dir. Fritz Kiersch (1984)
- The Witch, dir. Robert Eggers (2015)
References:
- Bruhm, S. (2016). The Global Village of the Damned: A Counter-Narrative for the Post-War Child. Narrative, 24(2), 156-173.
- Calvert, K. (1992). Children in the house: The material culture of early childhood, 1600-1900. Northeastern University Press.
- CT Capitol Dispatch. (2026, Jan. 20). In Focus: The Uncompromising Lobby Blocking Laws to Protect Homeschooled Kids. Capitol Dispatch. https://capitoldispatch.substack.com/p/in-focus-the-uncompromising-lobby
- Martins, J.L. (2023, Jan. 31). Why Do We Picture Witches as Old Women? Living History. https://juliamartins.co.uk/why-is-it-that-we-imagine-an-older-woman-when-we-think-of-a-witch
- McGivney, A. (2024). The Roots of Corruption in The Witch (Robert Eggers, 2015). Film Journal, 10.
- McNaughton, S., Robinson, S., & Pisoni, H. (2026, Jul. 21). In Pete Hegseth’s Pastor’s Ideal World, All Forms of Gay Sex Would be Criminal. Uncloseted Media. https://www.unclosetedmedia.com/p/hand-jobs-oral-sex-and-anal-pete
- Mukhopodhyay, D. (2020). The Children as Nemesis: A Reading of Stephen King’s “Children of the Corn” and Its Adaptations. In Olson, D. (Ed.), Children and Childhood in the Works of Stephen King, pp. 47-60. Lexington Books.
- Olivetti, K.A. (2020). Lost without Breadcrumbs: Family, Scapegoating, and the Rationalization of Abuse in Robert Eggers’s The Witch. Marvels & Tales, 34(2), 239-255.
- Panchuk, M. (2020). Distorting Concepts, Obscured Experiences: Hermeneutical Injustice in Religious Trauma and Spiritual Violence. Hypatia, 35(4), 607-625.
- Poole, W.S. (2010). Satan in America: The Devil We Know. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Kathleen Kellett 