Directed by Fritz Kiersch, the film's cast consists of Peter Horton, Linda Hamilton, John Franklin, Courtney Gains, Robby Kiger, Anne Marie McEvoy, Julie Maddalena, and R. G. Armstrong.

King wrote the original draft of the screenplay, which focused more on the characters of Burt and Vicky and depicted more history on the uprising of the children in Gatlin.

However, nine-year-old Isaac Croner takes all of the Gatlin children into the cornfields and indoctrinates them into a religious cult based around a bloodthirsty deity called "He Who Walks Behind the Rows".

Burt enters the church, where a congregation of children led by a girl named Rachel are performing a cultural birthday ritual for Amos by drinking his blood from a pentagram-shaped cut on his body.

Goldsmith said that King's script started with 35 pages of Burt and Vicky arguing in a car, so he decided to tell the story visually through the eyes of two new characters, children Job and Sarah.

[2][3] Goldsmith credited King with being extremely gracious when asked about the film in media interviews, stating in diplomatic ways he felt the new approach to be lacking.

Hal Roach eventually sold the project to New World Pictures, which decided to go with Goldsmith's script, although it tried unsuccessfully to remove his name from the credits in favor of King's.

After release of the highly successful film, Goldsmith revealed that much of the story was a metaphor for the Iranian Revolution, with the takeover of the town by quasi-religious zealots acting for an evil "God" based on the Ayatollah Khomeini and his revolutionary guard taking over Iran.

Burt and Vicky became analogous to the American hostages and Goldsmith was using a horror film to expose the dangers and evils of religious fundamentalism, something few critics recognized.

[4] During an interview on The Ghost of Hollywood, Fritz Kiersch explained how Courtney Gains won the role of Malachai by using a prop knife to hold a casting assistant hostage at the audition.

Gains claims that one of the great honors of his career is having hundreds of people, even his son's friends, recognize him as Malachai and confess they found him terrifying, some having admitted his performance gave them nightmares.

[8] Roger Ebert from the Chicago Sun Times awarded the film one out of four stars, writing: "By the end of Children of the Corn, the only thing moving behind the rows is the audience, fleeing to the exits".

[9] Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote: "As such movies go, Children of the Corn is fairly entertaining, if you can stomach the gore and the sound of child actors trying to talk in something that might be called farmbelt biblical".

[10] Ian Nathan from Empire gave the film three out of five stars, commending its originality, but criticized its obvious budgetary constraints, poor effects, and "ludicrous monster movie denouement".

[17] A second film adaptation was written and directed by Kurt Wimmer and stars Elena Kampouris, Kate Moyer, Callan Mulvey and Bruce Spence.